Today’s post was written by John Case, corporate vice president for Microsoft Office. I’m in Orlando this week, where more than 14,000 attendees are gathered for our annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). It’s a week of networking, sharing, learning and celebrating the incredible work Partners do every day. Our CEO Satya Nadella took the stage this morning to talk about our company ambition to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And I have the privilege of speaking on stage about the evolution of our channel and the investments we’re making to help Partners transform and grow their businesses in the cloud. As we innovate and deliver new experiences in Office, Azure, Dynamics CRM Online—and across all Microsoft products and services that enable people to achieve more at work—Microsoft Partners play a critical role in helping organizations across the globe to realize tangible business value. So today we are providing Partners a first look at some of the innovations we are bringing to help organizations transform the way they work. We are also announcing new investments in programs and resources designed to help Partners build and maintain profitable businesses. Here’s more on today’s news: Expanding the Cloud Solution Provider program Last year at WPC, I announced limited availability of our Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, designed to deepen Partners’ involvement in every aspect of the customer journey, from sales to renewal. Today I’m pleased to share that we are expanding the CSP program to include Azure, Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) and CRM Online, in addition to Office 365. We are making the program broadly available to all eligible Partners in 131 countries, up from 48 at last WPC. We are also introducing a new Partner Center for streamlined onboarding and customer management experience, as well as releasing new commerce APIs for Partners to automate transactions and integrate into their own systems. Delivering significant new value in Office 365 I am also pleased to announce our plans to introduce a new premium Office 365 Enterprise Suite called E5 before the end of this calendar year. E5 will encompass the core value of the modern productivity and collaboration capabilities Office 365 provides today, as well as significant new capabilities including Skype for Business services for real-time communication such as Cloud PBX and PSTN Conferencing, new analytics features like Power BI Pro and Delve Organizational Analytics, and new advanced security features such as eDiscovery, Customer Lockbox, Data Loss Protection (DLP) and Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). The E5 suite will provide a significant new opportunity for Partners to build service offerings to reach new customers and enhance value for existing ones. Driving customer value with Office 365 Finally, we are announcing the availability of a new dashboard that will enable Partners to directly view usage reports for their customers, right from within the Partner’s MPN Online Services Dashboard they use today. The new usage dashboard will help Partners identify opportunities for helping their customers realize the full value of Office 365 by taking full advantage of all of the services delivered within the suite. This investment also aligns with changes in our competency and incentive models to drive active usage. Office 365 remains the fastest growing commercial product in Microsoft’s history, and it’s unbelievably exciting to see so many Microsoft Partners seize the opportunity and achieve tremendous business growth with Microsoft Cloud services. Thank you, Microsoft Partners, for all that you do, and I look forward to a future of continued success and deep partnership as we work together to help organizations embrace the modern workplace. —John Case The post News from WPC—invested in Partner growth appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Matthew Boyd, public relations and communications executive for BrightStarr. In October of 2014, DORMA, the trusted global partner for premium access solutions and services for enabling better buildings, approached BrightStarr with the goal of investing in the way they innovate into the future. DORMA has built its success over the past 100 years on innovation enabling them to provide the very best solutions for their clients. Today, with 7,000 globally distributed employees spread across over 50 countries, their intranet is the vehicle for driving that innovation, empowering staff with the digital tools they need to ideate and achieve success. When DORMA partnered with BrightStarr, they had a rapidly approaching internal International Group Conference and the BAU Trade Fair. These two events are the platforms where DORMA launches new and innovative products, and they wanted their new intranet delivered in time to support them with new social collaboration and sharing. They also wanted the new intranet to replace their numerous locally managed solutions, yet still deliver personalized and highly relevant content to users regardless of language or location. DORMA decided that they would deploy the cutting-edge Office 365 Intranet as a service, Unily. In the words of Adrian Gagala, DORMA’s global intranet manager, "They were able to deliver access to innovation for all [their] people, taking [them] from zero to 100 in 60 working days—only possible with Unily and through the power of the Microsoft cloud." The Unily solution is built on Office 365, SharePoint Online and Azure, and it integrates all the best bits of the Office 365 platform into a unified enterprise portal, making it easier than ever for DORMA’s people to take full advantage of Office 365. DORMA’s intranet delivers The DORMA intranet delivers managed content, an intuitive CMS, Yammer integration and a host of other features to provide a full cloud, mobile and social intranet. Personalized experiences, targeted content and multi-lingual functionality—The dynamic smartfeed on the intranet homepage draws information from news, blogs, company announcements and apps to populate a targeted digest of information that is specific to the user. Users manage content targeted at them by tagging their profile with terms from the corporate taxonomy, which is used to tag all content within the intranet. This targeting is also used for localized content through the addition of location terms. These targeted intranet experiences are not limited by language or location. Users can set their primary language, changing all the intranet’s key navigation terms, and through the integration of Azure machine translation, have access to quick and cost-effective one-click translation, making content useful globally regardless of the language it has been uploaded in. Intuitive and simple CMS—Managing all the content within the intranet has been made easier than ever through a unique interface on top of the SharePoint CMS. Simple processes allow content creators to focus on the information they are sharing, rather than the process of creating it, for expedient insights and best practices that can travel the business in minutes, not hours. Yammer integration for enterprise social—Through deep Yammer integration, conversations can be started around all types of content in the intranet including news, stories, videos and documents. Group discussions and the Yammer All Company feed can be accessed within the intranet from the timeline. People directory—DORMA’s people directory offers a clean card-style rollup with search refiners based on department, job title, skills and location. Profile pages provide a place for users to showcase their experience and also surface Yammer statistics such as number of followers. In addition, users can start real-time conversations with colleagues from directly within the intranet through Skype for Business integration. Document management—The intranet has comprehensive document management capabilities including drag-and-drop upload to both SharePoint and OneDrive Pro. Version control delivers a single version of the truth globally and through metadata management, and SharePoint Search users can quickly and easily find what they need. Mobile accessibility through responsive design and native mobile applications—Through responsive design, content within DORMA’s intranet dynamically rearranges itself to be consumable on any device maintaining exceptional user experiences. In addition, DORMA’s intranet features native mobile applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone that can be downloaded from their respective apps stores. These native applications tie into the core functionality of the device, supporting tools like one-click calling from the people directory for quicker access to colleagues. Analytics—Behind the scenes, DORMA’s intranet has a powerful analytics engine for real-time insights into how the solution is being used. This allows DORMA to track engagement and adoption as well as continue to build on the success of their solution. DORMA was able to deploy a feature-full cloud, mobile and social intranet in the space of just 60 days—in time for the International Group Conference and the BAU Trade Fair. This made for a hugely successful launch supporting their biggest internal events with social conversations, news articles and insightful blogs. Their solution delivers personalized and localized intranet experiences ensuring content and information is relevant to each individual user, ultimately driving adoption, usage and ROI for the entire business. Since implementation of the new solution, DORMA have seen an increase in global corporate news coverage of 654 percent. Deployment of their new unified solution has resulted in a 27 percent cost saving through the consolidation of existing SharePoint portals, and through the 60 day deployment timescale, they have saved a further 15 percent over traditional bespoke SharePoint solutions. You can read more about DORMA’s Office 365 intranet story via the Unily website. —Matthew Boyd The post DORMA delivers access to innovation for 7,000 global employees with Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

It’s summer and the improvements keep coming! Office for Android phone is here, the Wunderlist app is now part of Microsoft, and Office Online, OneNote, and Office Mix are better than ever. For business users there are new Box integrations and a new Office 365 web experience, and admins now have a better way to stay informed during service incidents, plus workload-specific control over data access. Security and compliance updates include the new Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection plan, Compliance Search, RMS departmental templates, and new capabilities for Outlook on iOS and Android. Educators now have easy access to OneNote Class Notebooks, and Office Mix for online lessons now supports LTI and is integrated with LMS providers. There’s lots of news for developers too—from documentation and code samples to podcasts. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new: May 2015. Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates Office for Android phone is here—The new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for Android phone have arrived! Review and edit documents on the go, present from your phone, and quickly find the files you were working on in the office or on your tablet. Access files stored in OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box. You can download the apps today, and soon they’ll come preloaded on Samsung, Sony, LG and more Android phones. Wunderlist now part of Microsoft—Microsoft recently acquired Wunderlist, the market-leading to-do list app. Known for its ease of use and innovative design, Wunderlist provides an easy way to capture, organize and collaborate on lists and to-dos—for home, school and work. It’s a fantastic app and it’s available on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, Android, Windows Phone, Windows and the web. Easier formatting and viewing in Office Online—Polishing documents and illustrations in Office Online is easier than ever. Format text fast with the new autocorrect features and Format Painter in Word Online. Object formatting updates in PowerPoint Online make it easy to select, move, resize and delete objects, align objects with content, and create, edit and format tables in a browser. Viewing updates enhance your use of Word Online and PowerPoint Online across a wide range of devices. OneNote for iPhone and iPad—better, faster, touchier—Updates to lists on iPhone include larger checkboxes, checking an item to move it to the Completed folder, and more improvements you asked for. You can now view equations on your iPhone, and on your iPad, you can view and edit equations. Also on your iPad, you can now add ruled or grid lines to OneNote pages. And with the simplified iOS and Mac sign-up experience, you can easily share notebooks with friends, family, classmates and colleagues. Office Mix interactive tutorials—Learn how to use Office Mix the easy way. When you install the Office Mix add-in and open PowerPoint for the first time, an interactive panel opens that gives you the option to create your first mix, which opens the Getting Started template, or to play a video tutorial—What is Office Mix, Screen Recording, or Publish and Share. The panel is resizable and can be undocked, so you can move to split-screen mode and follow in step with the tutorial’s instructions. Sway apps now on more platforms and devices—Sway for iPad is available for download now in the App Store, as is an updated version of Sway for iPhone, which makes it easier to add pictures, videos and text to your Sways and preview your creations. Sway for iPad and iPhone now support Office 365 work and school credentials, plus more languages. And this summer, Sway for Windows 10 is coming! Office 365 for Business & Education updates* Office for Android phone is here—The new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for Android phone have arrived! Review and edit documents on the go, present from your phone, and quickly find the files you were working on in the office or on your tablet. Access files stored in OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box. You can download the apps today, and soon they’ll come preloaded on Samsung, Sony, LG, and more Android phones. One-click access to third-party apps—You can now launch third-party applications with a single click—right within Office 365, with no admin configuration or additional sign-in. Clicking the app launcher icon takes you to a special version of the Office 365 Store, and from there you can add third-party solutions to your My Apps page. It’s rolling out to Office 365 customers in the First Release program now. New Box integrations with Office Online—New integrations of Box with Office Online help you more easily collaborate with documents and digital content. With the new features you can easily browse, open and edit files with Office Online from Box, create new files in Office Online, and save them back to Box. New user experiences in Office 365 on the web—The Office 365 on the web experience has been updated with quick access to notifications, help and what’s new feature introductions, contextual and immersive settings, and the integration of Skype for Business conversations—all within the context of your work. The new features are rolling out now to those in the First Release program. Office 365 admins can now stay better informed during service incidents—Two new capabilities enable you to receive targeted, actionable communications during service incidents. With the new programmatic access to Office 365 service incident communications, you can receive service incident alerts the way you want. And you can stay informed with the new service incident push notifications with the Office 365 Admin app for Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices—rolling out now for First Release customers. More control over data access with workload-specific admin roles—The ability to assign workload-specific service administrator roles to your organization’s IT administrators for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Skype for Business Online has started rolling out. This ability gives you more control over how your Office 365 administrators access your data. Plus there’s now more flexibility in assigning roles. Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) available—ATP, a new email filtering service that complements Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and provides protection against specific types of advanced threats, is now available for purchase. Introducing Compliance Search in Office 365—There’s now a faster way of searching within your organization’s data in Office 365. Compliance Search is designed for times when the full search case management of eDiscovery search isn’t required. It’s ideal for quick searches, such as searching for specific credit card numbers in SharePoint as part of a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) project. Rights Management Service (RMS) departmental templates now in Office 2013—With departmental templates, a new RMS capability, organizations can define different policies that will be deployed to different departments (or roles) for their use in documents and emails. This capability is now supported in Office 2013. New Exchange Online Protection (EOP) features—Seven new features were added to continue providing security and reliability for your email and a simpler experience for email admins: scheduled EOP reports, domain-based email traffic support, simplified block and allow, quarantined message preview, bulk release, improved backscatter detection with Boomerang, and non-delivery report (NDR) backscatter storm prevention. Enhancing mail flow security for Exchange Online—Protecting your incoming and outgoing emails is a top priority for us, which is why we are always working to improve mail flow encryption. With new security vulnerabilities constantly being uncovered, and communication privacy being in the spotlight now more than ever, we seek to upgrade our service to only use the most secure Transport Layer Security (TLS)-based encryption available. In the last year, we have made several improvements to our service, and your mail has never been more secure. Announcing archiving for non-Microsoft data in Office 365—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. New Intune capabilities for Outlook on iOS and Android—Customers who use Outlook for iOS and Android can now use built-in mobile device management (MDM) for Office 365 or Microsoft Intune to secure email data on mobile devices within their organization. With this update and the recent updates to enable OAuth and add support for multi-factor authentication, Outlook offers the leading set of controls for protecting corporate email and calendar data on mobile devices. New access and security controls for Outlook for iOS and Android—Outlook now uses Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based authentication for Exchange Online mailboxes in Office 365. This new authentication method enables IT administrators to configure new access scenarios for sign-in to Office 365 and to better control and manage Outlook on mobile devices in their organization. Updates to Power Query—Improvements were made to the Privacy levels dialog, where users are asked to provide privacy levels for all data sources involved in a query, and also to the Salesforce connectors and the Excel Workbook connector. New text column filters—"Does Not Begin With…" and "Does Not End With…"—were added too. Surface Hub on the way to transform your meetings—Surface Hub, a new large-screen collaboration device that harnesses the power of Windows 10, Skype for Business, Office, OneNote and Windows universal apps, is coming soon. With Skype for Business, Office and OneNote integrated into the operating system, Surface Hub delivers a new set of digital tools to help teams create and brainstorm in a way that’s natural and efficient. Highly scalable archives coming for Office 365 email—Built-in archiving is one of the most popular IT features in Office 365, and to accommodate customers who require very, very large archiving storage, auto-expanding is being added. Auto-expanding allows you to take advantage of a bottomless archive without needing to call support or perform any manual steps. Also, limits on the Recoverable Items store were removed. Resource Engagements—coming soon to Project 2016—Resource Engagements, a new capability in the next update of Project, helps align project managers and resource managers on the amount of work and the time period associated with a project. Resource Engagements is an evolution of Resource Plan in PWA, and all your existing Resource Plan data will be converted to engagements when you activate or upgrade. Office Mix amps the slideshow experience—Deliver personalized presentations or instruction with Office Mix. Its innovative player groups content into scenes organized as PowerPoint slides, which lets viewers skip directly to the content that most interests them. Viewers can also use the slide sorter view to see all the slides together and jump directly to the content they want to watch next. Office Mix provides viewer analytics, too, which authors can use to strengthen their presentations. Check it out for conferences and the classroom. Office Mix supports LTI and is integrated with LMS providers—Office Mix, the free add-in for PowerPoint for creating and sharing interactive online lessons, now supports Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) and it’s integrated with major Learning Management Systems (LMS) providers. LTI adoption enables McGraw-Hill Education to use Office Mix to provide custom teaching experiences and Cengage Learning to offer an Introductory Computing MindTap pilot integrating Office Mix for fall 2015 classes. LMS integration makes it easy for educators to embed mixes into a wide variety of LMS. OneNote Class Notebooks more accessible and discoverable—Using OneNote Class Notebooks to organize and collaborate with students next school year just got easier. Teachers with Office Education in the U.S. can now create OneNote Class Notebooks right from their Office 365 App Launcher and My Apps page and access them via a simple link with additional resources. Soon the app will be automatically available to teachers with Office 365 Education worldwide. Find out how to check if you’re eligible or sign up to try it for free. Coming soon—new ways to achieve more in your classroom—The first phase of a Preview program has begun for two new Education services—Microsoft Class Dashboard and Microsoft School Information Sync. Both services will be available to Office 365 Education users at no additional charge. Class Dashboard and School Information Sync simplify connections between systems and communication and collaboration between teachers and students. Find out how they can help you save time while engaging students in new ways. An early look at Cortana integration with Office 365—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. Office 365 Developer updates Monthly Dev Digest for June—Keep up with what’s new in Office 365 development—read the digest! Get the latest dev news and find out about new and updated documentation, code samples and patterns and practices samples, plus podcasts, blog posts and upcoming events. This month’s digest also includes a shout-out to the winner and runners-up of the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) Office and SharePoint Application Development award. Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide. —Andy O’Donald @andyodonald *Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics. The post What’s new: June 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.

After weeks of judging, the 34 best Office add-ins and apps of 2015 were announced today at a celebration party at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Orlando. Top partners such as Nintex, DocuSign and Smartsheet snared a combined 13 first-, second- or third-place awards across 13 categories in the second annual contest. Many smaller and emerging partners captured prizes as well. They included polling company Mentimeter; expense-software provider Ivero; HR specialist Kirkness Associates; forms provider Ardevia Software; and SharePoint specialist SkyLite Systems—all of whom captured first place awards of their own. In all, Microsoft judges considered 110-plus top productivity solutions culled from hundreds of candidates across the Office Store, Azure Marketplace, and the Windows Phone, Android and iTunes stores. To be eligible, solutions must have been published or updated this year, interact with Office data, sport high quality ratings and/or solid user evaluations, or meet certain other quantitative metrics. Judges were especially impressed by a raft of education-focused solutions by ELEARNINGFORCE, Mobiliya Technologies and Fluidity Software—all first place finishers. These represent the leading edge of a fleet of new education solutions being published to the Office 365 Store this summer, greatly strengthening our education extensibility story. Rounding out the first place winners were Microsoft Project specialists Sensei Project Solutions and Campana & Schott, while SONJASAPPS and iGlobe captured top honors for their commitment to international development and distribution. Bullhorn for Email captured first place for "Most Launched Office Add-in" (excluding dictionaries). "It really was gratifying to see the breadth and depth of the Office add-ins and apps available today," said Jim Epes of Office Developer Marketing, who managed the contest. "Picking winners was actually pretty tough. We have more than 1,750 Store add-ins now, and hundreds more mobile and federated web apps that call Office data—so few people are fully conversant with all of them. It was fun to hear our engineers muttering ‘that’s really cool’ when we showed them a new solution they hadn’t seen before." Taking the prize for "People’s Choice" was forms and workflow vendor Nintex USA, which captured no fewer than five awards, including first place for "Most-Launched SharePoint Add-in" and "Most Business Value SharePoint Add-in" plus two second place awards, including "Best Mobile App." Nintex, which ranks among the very first partners to commit to the Office Store when it launched in 2012, also was named the WPC Conference’s "Office and SharePoint Development Application Partner of the Year." Electronic signature leader DocuSign captured five awards as well, with a first for "Highest Business Value Office Add-in" and four second place finishes. Smartsheet captured first place for "Best Office 365 App" among its three awards, while both ELEARNINGFORCE and photo-serving solution PicHit.me won two awards each. Mobiliya won for "Best Mobile Solution." Full details about all winners and their categories are featured on dev.office.com/app-awards-winners. Additionally, winners receive merchandizing in the Office Store (if published there) and additional recognition and consideration throughout the rest of the year. The post Announcing the 2015 Office App Awards winners appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Douglas Wills, professor of Economics at the University of Washington. In the spring term of 2015, I organized the Intermediate Microeconomics course at the University of Washington, Tacoma using Microsoft’s new OneNote Class Notebook. Over 50 students were enrolled for the mathematics-based course. The OneNote Class Notebook created for the class worked exactly as advertised. Each student had a private tab, access to all class material, and the syncing worked flawlessly. Some students used the online version, some the desktop, and virtually all of them accessed the notebook via multiple devices. However, there were three things that made the use of OneNote outstanding and will keep me coming back to it for future classes. OneNote as the classroom whiteboard I’ve used the "inking" feature of Tablet PCs in the classroom since tablets first came out over a decade ago. Using programs such as Windows Journal or PDF Annotator, all my lecture notes are written on the tablet, projected on the classroom screen, and then saved to be distributed to students (typically in PDF). Two of the big advantages of this technique are that I’m always facing the students when lecturing—even when writing—and the students get a perfect record of everything written in class. Thus, a student can stop worrying about writing down every equation or sentence precisely and can focus on the points being made in the lecture. Using OneNote improves on this, especially with the Surface Pro 3, which I now use. By writing directly on a page in OneNote, the lecture notes are automatically synced to every student’s notebook within seconds. This means that immediately upon the end of class, all students (even the ones who did not attend) have the notes in their OneNote Class Notebook without me having to take any additional steps. This allows students to annotate the lectures immediately after class. The second improvement came from using Surface Pro 3’s built-in wireless function, Miracast. By plugging in Microsoft’s Wireless Display Adaptor into the HDMI input, I was no longer "tied" to the screen control console, which was usually off to the side of the room. Now I could move my computer to a more central location, one closer to the students, or even move the computer around the room. Ease of input Anyone who has taught upper-level economics classes, especially ones focusing on public policies, knows that a critical part of a successful class is getting news about current affairs (articles, videos, etc.) up on the course website as quickly as possible. OneNote shines in this regard; one can print virtually anything found on the web directly to a specific tab in the notebook. So you can quickly and efficiently direct content to the entire class, groups or specific students. Of course, the same is true for the students, as they can post articles to the Collaboration Space for all students to read and comment on. Once again, using the Surface Pro enhanced the usability of OneNote. In Economics, one often just wants a table or graph from an article to discuss in class. Capturing only a graph can often be a tedious and time-consuming endeavor—but no longer. Simply by clicking the pen, one can capture any area of the screen and send that information directly to OneNote. In general, it was much easier to change and upload content. I didn’t have to convert everything to PDF format to upload, or when something had to be changed (due to a typo, etc.), it could be changed directly and quickly. This made the course online content far more dynamic, as it was much easier to post new material. As for content from students, in the past they would have to email me the link and then I would post it using the aforementioned steps. Now the students can do it directly. Change in office hours As important as the aforementioned benefits of OneNote are, the most important was how it changed my office hours. In a mathematics-based course, with lots of questions, I would usually have students coming to office hours every week to help them with questions. Then, after working through a question on the board or on paper, the student would usually take a picture of the board or ask to keep the paper. This term I did not have a single student come to office hours, not one! The students quickly learned that a far superior way to have their questions answered was to post it on their private notebook tab and then "tag" it with a question mark. Each time I opened the course notebook, I searched for new tags. When a new tag appeared, I would click the tag, which took me directly to the student’s question. Of course, at that point I would answer the question, usually writing out the answer with the Surface pen. But what made this format truly superior was using the built-in recording function of OneNote. As I wrote out the answer, I would make an audio recording of my explanation of each of the steps. When the student played it back, OneNote highlighted each step as the student listened to the answer. So not only did the students have a permanent copy of my answer, they also had a recording of my explanation. Accommodate any teaching and organization style While these benefits were huge for an upper-level economics course, the value of the benefits will vary depending on the type of class. I think the true power of using OneNote is that it accommodates any teaching style—standard PowerPoint-based lectures, flipping, hybrid or interactive question-and-answer, of the type I use. In addition, it is ideal for writing-based courses or courses with significant group work. The professor has the ability to create a password-protected "group tab" that only group members have access to, in addition to the professor. Now that I’ve used this format for an entire class, I’ve realized another significant benefit. It gives me an easy way to organize all my course material. By creating a duplicate notebook, I can store all the notes, questions, videos, etc. in one place. Then, using that notebook when I teach the course again, I can easily incorporate changes and control how information is released in the new class by simply copying pages to the new course notebook. For those professors reluctant to invest time in new tools, their familiarity with Office makes the implementation of OneNote virtually painless. And now that Microsoft has announced that the OneNote Class Notebook will be integrated with Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Canvas and Blackboard, the faculty member has the best of both worlds. The post OneNote Class Notebooks and a Surface Pro 3 in higher education appeared first on Office Blogs.

With Project Server 2013 and Project Online, we replaced our server-side scheduling engine with the Project Calculation Service (PCS), bringing the power of the Project Professional scheduling engine to the browser. This new service also powered our new cloud-ready Project API, also known as the Client Side Object Model (CSOM). However, the transition to PCS and CSOM wasn’t quite exhaustive. There are still elements of Project Web App (PWA) and our legacy API, the Project Server Interface (PSI), which rely on the old server-side scheduling engine. Discrepancies between the two engines are a problem for our customers. To resolve these issues, the legacy server-side scheduling engine will be fully removed from Project Server 2016 and Project Online, along with the Project class methods of the PSI. CSOM is the future of PWA extensibility, and we will continue to make improvements to CSOM based on your feedback to ensure parity with legacy PSI scenarios. What’s changing? There will be changes in the following three areas: Project Detail Pages (PDPs) that today rely on the legacy server-side scheduling engine to process and save data will now use PCS exclusively. The Project class of the PSI is being removed. Customizations leveraging methods in this class will need to be updated to instead use Project CSOM methods. As we identify gaps between scheduling PSI and CSOM coverage, we will invest in new CSOM methods to unblock these scenarios. These improvements will roll out online when ready and ship to Project Server 2016 customers through Public Updates. What’s the timing? For on-premises customers, Project Server 2016 will ship with all of these changes implemented. As previously mentioned, CSOM improvements will ship with Project Server Public Updates. Online customers will see some of these changes rolling out within the next month. We will roll these changes out in phases and continue to work on CSOM improvements for the foreseeable future. In Project Server 2013, we will continue to support the current PSIs and will continue fixing any issues related to the legacy server-side scheduling engine that customers encounter. What do I do? If you’ve built customizations leveraging the Project class of the PSI, you’ll need to do some work to replace those methods with their equivalent CSOM methods. If you’re a developer with custom Project solutions, you’ll need to make the necessary changes in the near future to ensure your solutions continue functioning properly. If you find scenarios that are not covered with our current CSOM implementation, please let us know! We are committed to building a rich, fully-featured API that supports our partner ecosystem and our end users. The post A unified scheduling engine and API in Project Online and Project Server 2016 appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Power Query update includes six new or improved features including: Improvements to ODBC Connector Navigator dialog improvements Option to enable Fast Data Load versus Background Data Load Support for Salesforce Custom environments in Recent Sources list Easier parsing of Date or Time values out of a Text column with Date/Time information Unpivot Other Columns entry in column context menu You can continue reading below for more details about each feature. Improvements to ODBC Connector We improved the ODBC Connector by making the SQL statement optional instead of required. Now users can simply provide the Connection String for their ODBC source and navigate the list of tables available from the data source, pick up the ones they want to import, and apply any additional transformations needed in the Query Editor. This greatly simplifies the process for bringing in data from several data sources supported via ODBC. Navigator dialog improvements With this update, we made several improvements to the Navigator dialog: Ability to resize the Navigator pane—We made the list of databases/tables, in the left side of the Navigator dialog, resizable to improve readability. Added the "Preview downloaded on…" message—On the Navigator dialog previews, below the table name, the new "Preview downloaded on…" message has been added to indicate the freshness of the data. In many cases, Power Query leverages the local cache for previews of tables that users have already imported. This might be confusing to users seeing outdated data. The "Preview downloaded on…" message addresses this confusion. The message is displayed for previews older than 24 hours. Note: if you want to retrieve the latest data preview before importing the data, it’s also possible to refresh this data preview from the top-right corner of the dialog. Option to enable Fast Data Load versus Background Data Load We added an option for users to control whether the query should be loaded to the workbook in the background or use the new "Fast Data Load" option to accelerate the query download. The default behavior is "Background Data Load," but now users can instead choose the "Fast Data Load" mode in the Options dialog. When loading a query using the "Fast Data Load" mode, your query will take less time to load, however, Excel may be unresponsive for long periods of time during the upload. Support for Salesforce Custom environments in Recent Sources list Last month we added a new option to the Salesforce connector to specify whether to connect to Production or a Custom environment. This month we are enabling the Salesforce Custom environments to be shown in the Recent Sources list. Easier parsing of Date or Time values out of a Text column We made it much easier to extract a Date or a Time value from a text column that contains a DateTime or DateTimeTimezone value represented as Text. Before this update, you would need to convert your Text column to DateTime or DateTimeTimeZone and then extract the Date or Time component. In this month’s update, we’ve added two new options under the Transform and Add Column tabs, in the Date & Time dropdown menus, to parse these data types out of the currently selected Text columns. Unpivot Other Columns entry in column context menu "Unpivot Columns" is one of the most popular transformations in Power Query. However, what many users don’t know is that "Unpivot Other Columns" is even better! "Unpivot Other Columns" helps users ensure their queries automatically pick up new columns added to the original data in the future. This is the most common case for tables where new columns are added for each new period of data (i.e. years, quarters). Users only need to select the columns that are "stable" and select Unpivot Other Columns—from that point on all other columns in the table will be unpivoted. "Unpivot Other Columns" has been available for a while in the Transform tab, under Unpivot Columns, but now we also added it to the column context menu in the preview for easier access and discoverability. That’s all for this month. We’re making lots of incremental improvements to Power Query and we hope that you find it better with every new monthly update. Please continue sending us feedback using our "Send a Smile/Frown" feature, or by voting for what you’d like to see next. —Miguel Llopis, program manager on the Power Query team. Power Query for Excel is available with an Office 365 ProPlus subscription, Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance, Office 2013 Professional Plus or Excel 2013 Standalone. Power Query for Excel is also available in all other Excel 2013 Desktop SKUs with reduced functionality. Check out the System Requirements section on this page for more details. Download the add-in and learn more about getting started. Learn about all the powerful analytics and visualization features in Excel and take your analysis further by sharing and collaborating on business insights with colleagues using Power BI. Learn more about Power Query See all analytics and visualization features in Excel Get your Office 365 subscription Try Power BI Follow us: Facebook and Twitter The post 6 updates in Power Query for Excel appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last week, the United States Air Force announced it has selected Office 365 to power productivity and collaboration for more than 100,000 active, civilian and reserve personnel. Through deployment of a Department of Defense (DoD) dedicated version of Office 365, Service members will have access to the comprehensive and integrated set of productivity capabilities Office 365 provides, including email, Skype for Business calling and meetings, real-time document co-authoring, and other collaboration tools. The agreement is one of the largest commercial cloud contracts in DoD history, and is expected to help the Air Force significantly reduce costs over the next three years. No organization deserves a more enterprise- and security-ready approach than the Air Force. Read more about its selection of Office 365 over on the Microsoft Government blog. The post U.S. Air Force selects Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month we’re upgrading your OneNote mobile experience with improvements to iOS and Android. One app for OneNote iPad and iPhone You might have noticed that our apps had a "for iPad" and "for iPhone" in the title—that’s because they were two separate apps. This month we did a bunch of work behind the scenes to create one universal iOS app that works on both iPad and iPhone. If you are an iPad user today, you will need to get the new OneNote app from the store. When you open your current iPad app, you will see instructions for getting the app. If you are an iPhone user, you don’t need to do anything—we merged the iPad app into the iPhone app so you already have it. With the universal iOS OneNote app, iPad users will have some of the recent updates made to the iPhone app, and we’ll be able to move even faster to update the app with new features. New iPad features Some of the recent updates to iPhone are now available for iPad including: Today Widget—Create new notes, start a list, and access your most recent notes with one tap from the Notification Center. This is a great way to quickly capture something before you forget without having to navigate to the app. Recent Notes—Find your most recently edited notes with the "Recent Notes" view to display the list of recent notes across all the notebooks open on your iPad. Page Previews—If you turn your iPad into landscape mode you will see page previews. This makes it quick to remember what content is on a page. Document/Whiteboard camera—Thanks to your feedback about the document/whiteboard camera not working properly, we were able to fix the bug; it turns out the lens cap was left on when using the Document/Whiteboard camera. You can download OneNote for iOS on the Apple App Store today! OneNote for Android updates We recently updated the OneNote for Android, which introduces one of the top feature asks—the ability to move or copy pages from one section or notebook to another section or notebook. Now, if you took a note in a hurry and it is still in your Quick Notes section, you can move it to the Notebook where it really belongs. Or, if your teacher shared an assignment or notes with you, and you want to copy it to your notes, now you can do that too using OneNote for Android. Let’s see how it works: Moving or copying a page from one section to another is very simple. On the page list, just tap and hold on the page you would like to move or copy. Select the operation you would like to perform from the menu and then select the destination section—you are done. For quick access, you can also add a page directly to your Home screen.   Apart from this, we also made some stability improvements and fixed user reported issues. Android Wear Take note: we have a big update coming for our Android Wear app. You asked for a way to view recent notes and tasks on your watch, so we’ve made it possible to view your big ideas on your small(er) screen. In a few days we’ll have a beta available, and you will be able to get a sneak peek at the functionality ahead of time by joining our Beta Community, or wait a few weeks for it to come to the Play Store. You can download OneNote for Android via Google Play today! Follow OneNote on Google+. Join the Google+ Beta community and be the first one to try out the latest updates. We’d love to hear what you think of these updates, so please let us know in the comments, in-app feedback or by submitting a review. —Ryan McMinn, product manager for the OneNote team. The post OneNote July mobile updates for iOS and Android appeared first on Office Blogs.

As a digital storytelling app, Sway makes it easy for students, teachers, professionals and consumers to bring all sorts of narratives to life in a new and interactive way. This blog series highlights the great examples of Sways made across different categories by all sorts of people to make their ideas shine. In the last Sway Use Case blog, we got a taste of many delicious and visually delightful Sways that chefs, foodies, and culinary adventurers have created, all centered around food. In today’s post, we’ll get down to business and dive into some of the many ways that small businesses and professionals alike are using Sway for professional storytelling, collaboration and sharing ideas in new ways internally and with their customers. Check out the highlights below! Swaying potential clients with an event venue brochure Jonathan Price (London, @JonnoPrice) is the sales and marketing manager at Maudsley Learning (@MaudsleyLearn). He used Sway to create a fluid and engaging promotional brochure to share the offerings and specifications for the ORTUS learning and events center in London. Complete with images, venue highlights and even a promotional offer, this new format helps sway prospective clients in an easy-to-share way. Check out Jonathan’s brochure Sway: Recapping a project and sharing a portfolio piece with Sway Empired (Australia, @EmpiredLtd) is an IT services provider that delivers business technology solutions across Australia. Sway helped Empired showcase a cloud-based intranet solution it built for the Telethon Kids Institute in Western Australia. Bringing together material including infographics, screenshots, and headshots, Empired’s Sway is an interactive and structured way to promote the solution and the Empired team in a format that is engaging and easy to share internally and with clients. Check out Empired’s project recap Sway: Swaying the market with thought leadership JP Bedell (New York, @Jamesbedell) is a sales rep and blogger for the lighting solutions provider SDA Lighting. It’s important for any company to promote itself by demonstrating thought leadership and expertise in its field. JP uses Sway to showcase lighting principles for the office of the future in this combination blog and industry white paper. Bringing together images, text, videos, and tweets, this Sway provides JP and SDA an interactive and dynamic format for easily sharing professional perspectives in a compelling way with prospective clients and the market. Check out JP’s illuminating Sway: Using Sway to make real estate listings stand out Susan Taylor (South Carolina, @susanttaylor) works in real estate in South Carolina. In an industry where visual presentation can make all the difference in piquing the interest of a buyer and driving a sale, Susan has been using Sway to make real estate listings stand out in a polished, interactive way that is easy to share across a wide variety of channels. Susan combines descriptions, pictures, videos and more in her Sways to bring properties to life and create a digital landscape for the homes she sells. Come take a tour of one of Susan’s real estate listing Sways: Promoting specialty services with Sway Cupcakes Actually (Virginia, @cupcakesnobs) proudly sells delicious-looking custom cupcakes baked onsite in its two Virginia shop locations. The recipe to success in the food service industry is complex and self-promotion is key. Cupcakes Actually has been using Sway to easily and broadly share a showcase of its beautifully-designed and expertly crafted cupcake lineup in a format whose visual polish and professional formatting reflects the quality of the cupcakes they bake. Try not to salivate over this particular Sway by Cupcakes Actually, which promotes their wedding portfolio: Well, we’re sold! These are just a handful of the many Sways we’re seeing from small businesses who are using Sway’s new interactive and easily shareable format to promote their services, showcase their expertise, recap their work, and attract more customers. Thanks to all of you who have been creating Sways to help drive your businesses forward. Feel free to continue sharing with us on Twitter at @Sway! —Sway team, @Sway   Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post Sway Use Case series #3: Small business Sways appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to a panel of SharePoint MVPs at SPTechCon Dev Days including Marc Anderson, Andrew Connell, Scot Hillier, Paul Schaeflein and Eric Shupps. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP54_sptechconpanel.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Worldwide Partner Conference 2015 Gigjam: unleashing the human process Training updates Office 365 APIs for Mail Office 365 APIs for Calendar File Handler HOL Groups API HOL Unified API HOL Video API HOL PnP guidance added dev.office.com pages Office 2016 for Mac is generally available Announcing new activity logging and reporting capabilities for Office 365 Debugging websites with Visual Studio code SharePoint apps add-ins minify Adding Custom Tiles to the Office 365 App Launcher Inconvenient Internet Explorer security zones and Azure AD web applications Header/Footer with Breadcrumb and Global Ribbon SPO Office 365 Dev 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 Marc Anderson Marc is the co-Founder and president of Sympraxis Consulting LLC, located in the Boston suburb of Newton, MA, USA.  Sympraxis focuses on enabling collaboration throughout the enterprise using the SharePoint application platform. Marc has over 30 years of experience in technology professional services and software development. Over a wide-ranging career in consulting as well as line manager positions, Marc has proven himself as a problem solver and leader who can solve difficult technology problems for organizations across a wide variety of industries and organization sizes. Check out his blog at sympmarc.com and follow him on @sympmarc. About Scot Hillier Scot Hillier is an independent consultant and Microsoft SharePoint MVP focused on creating solutions for Information Workers with SharePoint, Office and related .NET technologies. A frequent speaker at TechEd and SharePoint Connections, he is also the author many books on Microsoft technologies, including five for SharePoint 2010. Scot splits his time between consulting on SharePoint projects and training for Critical Path Training. Scot is a former U. S. Navy submarine officer and graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. Scot can be reached at scot@shillier.com. About Andrew Connell Andrew is an entrepreneur and developer with an emphasis in Microsoft SharePoint and content management systems (CMS). In April of 2005 he was recognized by Microsoft for his community contributions by being awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Content Management Server and has received the award annually for SharePoint Server every year since. Most of his work these days involves working with the Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365 and web development technologies. Read more at about  Andrew Connell  and follow him on @andrewconnell. About Paul Schaeflein Paul Schaeflein has worked with Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies since it was called the Digital Dashboard. This work encompasses substantial custom development, implementations and training. Also, Paul was granted the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for his community work - primarily presentations at national conferences, regional events and user groups. Check out Paul’s blog www.schaeflein.net/blog and follow him on @paulschaeflein. About Eric Shupps Eric Shupps is the founder and president of BinaryWave, a leading provider of administration and productivity solutions for Microsoft SharePoint. Eric has worked with SharePoint Products and Technologies since 2001 as a consultant, administrator, architect, developer and trainer. He is an advisory committee member of the Dallas/Ft. Worth SharePoint Community group and a participating member of user groups throughout the United Kingdom. Eric has authored numerous articles on SharePoint, speaks at user group meetings and conferences around the world, and publishes a popular SharePoint blog at www.sharepointcowboy.com.   About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is based, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 054 panel discussion on SharePoint development appeared first on Office Blogs.

Transforming the way your organization works isn’t easy. Employees, like consumers, have habits…patterns…favorites…none of which they’re willing to trade for the latest cloud productivity trends. Yet, the important conversations that help you to set your business apart don’t just happen in the office. You need to be where your employees are so you can listen to and learn from their changing needs. Companies report 76 percent* more visibility into other departments and office locations by using Yammer. In addition, companies have seen a 37 percent** improvement in project collaboration by leveraging familiar productivity tools like PowerPoint, Excel and Word in a real-time, co-editing cloud environment. And finally, 93 percent*** of business leaders agree that internal social tools stimulate innovation, leading to business and innovation growth. Microsoft Partners help you realize your own success with Office 365. As service providers and as Microsoft customers themselves, they’re sharing their success stories here at Office Blogs. We’ve shared a few below. Read about how you can take your cloud productivity transformation to the next level and get your head in the cloud with Office 365. SharePoint and Office 365 for Enterprise Social Communications Are You Connected or Connecting? Realizing Measurable Value with Your Yammer Network   * Yammer, 2013 ** Inside Communication, 2012 *** Red River, 2013 The post Re-introducing the Office 365 Partner blog series appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Reuben Krippner, director of product management for Office 365, focused primarily on OneDrive for Business. The OneDrive for Business team has been working to deliver the most commonly requested controls by IT admins. Today, we’ll highlight new management options you have to protect and control the flow of your information using OneDrive for Business. In addition, this week’s Office Mechanics show walks through the new controls and how to implement them as IT admin: Limiting file sync to domain joined PCs OneDrive for Business enables users to synchronize their files for offline use across their PCs or Macs. One of the most common requests from IT admins is to have the ability to block sync on unmanaged PCs. Now you can enable file sync to work only on domain-joined PCs (and you can even specify which of your domains you want to allow to sync), thereby blocking file sync on personally owned or unmanaged PCs. Note that using this setting means that you will disable file sync on all Macs as they cannot be domain-joined and managed like PCs. This new control uses PowerShell to limit file sync to a list of permitted domains and, if your organization uses multiple domains, you can select the individual domains from which you allow sync requests. The PowerShell cmdlet and syntax you use is:Set-SPOTenantSyncClientRestriction  -Enable -DomainGuids "786548DD-877B-4760-A749-6B1EFBC1190A; 877564FF-877B-4760-A749-6B1EFBC1190A"The "DomainGuids" value represents the domain you are allowing. You can find more details on TechNet, including how to determine your domain GUIDs. We also demonstrate this on the show. Auditing all actions taken against OneDrive for Business files New auditing controls rolling into the Office 365 compliance center allow you to audit all actions taken against files stored in OneDrive for Business. If you want to monitor activities like which PCs or Macs attempted to sync with OneDrive or who viewed and shared files, the auditing controls provide that visibility. You can learn more in this recent Office Blogs post, and we demonstrate some of the auditing capabilities on the show. Managing mobile devices connecting to OneDrive for Business data As more people move to OneDrive for Business to store and access their files, email-based mobile device management (MDM) policies may not suffice to protect data. Now using MDM in Office 365, you can ensure that devices connecting to your OneDrive for Business data are managed. After you’ve set up MDM policies, a device will need to enroll in MDM for Office 365 when it tries to connect to your data using OneDrive for Business or Office Mobile apps. This ensures that the device meets security requirements, enforces PIN log-in and other chosen configurations on the device. You can find out more about MDM for Office 365 and see it in action on the show. Setting storage quotas in OneDrive for Business Even though the prospect of having 1 TB of data in the cloud is attractive for many people, several organizations have requested the ability to set smaller quota limits. It could be to limit the amount of data stored, for information protection reasons, or simply to ensure that what people store in OneDrive for Business can sync (and fit) on their PC’s hard drive. In this case, PowerShell is again used to determine the storage quota. Here’s an example:Set-SPOSite -Identity https://yourdomain-my.sharepoint.com/personal/username_yourdomain_com   -StorageQuota 512000We demonstrate this feature on the show, and you’ll find more information for the Set-SPOSite cmdlet on TechNet. Preventing unintentional sharing to "Everyone" or "All Users" in OneDrive for Business OneDrive for Business is designed to ensure that only those with viewing or editing permissions can view or edit a file. Many organizations want sharing with people to be a very specific and targeted action. For example, they want their users to determine the specific people they need to share a file with and explicitly invite them through the sharing dialog. We’ve also offered the "Shared with Everyone" folder, which means files placed in this folder automatically grant users permissions and are publically discoverable through Delve. We had a lot of feedback from customers that this folder was an all-too-simple way to avoid specifically nominating people who should get access to a file. Based on this feedback, for all new tenants and users, the "Shared with everyone" folder will no longer be created by default; however, IT admins have the ability to override this setting. If this is something you’ve been waiting for to protect information, you’ll also be happy to know that there are controls to remove "Everyone," "All Users" and "Everyone except external users" from the people picker in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. Again, you would use PowerShell to disable these entries from the people picker with the following settings:Set-SPOTenant -ShowEveryoneClaim $falseSet-SPOTenant -ShowEveryoneExceptExternalUsersClaim $falseSet-SPOTenant -ShowAllUsersClaim $falseMore information about the Set-SPOTenant cmdlet is on TechNet and we highlight this as well as the resulting user experience on the show. More to come in OneDrive for Business These new controls, all based on your feedback, provide more capabilities to protect corporate information in OneDrive for Business. In the coming months, we’ll deliver a whole range of new user experiences including our new sync client (featuring selective sync), new web client refresh and offline file support for mobile devices. We’ll also bring in new controls for IT admins to manage the scope or span of sharing outside the organization as well as other controls that provide additional ways to protect key business files. So keep checking back; be sure to try out the new management controls today and let us know what you think. -Reuben Krippner The post New IT management controls added to OneDrive for Business appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Office 365 Dev Digest was written by Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 Dev team. Welcome to the fifth edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep up-to-date with what’s new in Office 365 development. On July 9th we announced the news that Office 2016 for Mac was released. Currently this includes support for Office Add-ins in Outlook, and our engineering team is working hard to support add-ins in Word, PowerPoint and Excel as well. This means if you have written an Office Add-in that works right now with Office 2013 on Windows desktop, Office Online or Office for iOS, it will also work with the Mac version. On June 24th, we also announced that Office for Android Phone is generally available. Right now, these apps do not support Office Add-ins, but once our engineers are done with OSX and iOS add-in support, Android is next! Visual Studio 2015 will also be released on July 20th with an online streamed Connect() event that is well worth watching! Based on your feedback we made improvements for Office 365 developers, including an updated Add Connected Service wizard. Yesterday we announced a new dedicated Channel 9 show, The Office Dev Show, devoted to all things Office 365 development-related. The show, hosted by Sonya Koptyev, will include guests from the Office 365 Extensibility engineering team, as well as key community members. The show will feature new code and capabilities that have been added for devs to customize the Office platform, including the desktop, online and mobile versions as well as a series on how to "Get Started" building on the platform. We also announced that Office 365 users gain one-click access to third-party apps through a new Office 365 Store tile on the app launcher and Store link in the My Apps page. This will dramatically increase the exposure of your products in the Office 365 Store. We are seeing more and more products want to be a first-class citizen of the Office 365 experience across all our workloads and not just inside Office apps and SharePoint. There are new activity logging and reporting capabilities through the Office 365 Management Activity API. The capabilities here will continually grow over time, and if you are an ISV, there is a program where you can submit your interest. We have just published a bunch of new hands-on labs for APIs that we announced in a preview of Build/Ignite at dev.office.com/training. Check out over 80 labs, including File Handler, Groups API, Unified API and Video Portal APIs, which you can take in your own time for free at dev.office.com/training. We worked closely to get a case study published about how Blue Meteorite in Finland transformed their on-premises SharePoint Farm Solution intranet product to the SharePoint Add-in model. For more information on how to transform your product, please visit dev.office.com/transform. Our team also created a new Reddit sub-reddit to encourage contributions and a FlipBoard magazine to keep up-to-date with news around Office 365 development! I encourage you all to engage with us on the Office 365 Technical Network with your questions. Dev documentation The Microsoft Content Publishing team works hard producing documentation to help developers learn our platform. Here are the key new and updated articles for this month: Solution guidance (SharePoint) Create remote timer jobs in SharePoint Authorize provider-hosted app users at run time by using OAuth Cross-domain images in SharePoint provider-hosted add-ins Elevated privileges in SharePoint Add-ins Upload web parts in SharePoint Use asynchronous operations in SharePoint Add-ins Office Add-ins Document.getFileAsync method Document.getSelectedDataAsync method Document.setSelectedDataAsync method TableData object TableData.headers property TableData.rows property Context.commerceAllowed property Context.touchEnabled property Office integration Integrate with Office from iOS applications Office for iOS support for the iOS Document Picker Integrate with Office from Windows universal apps Integrate with Office from Win32 sync clients Office for Android support for the Android Storage Access Framework Integrate with Office from Android applications Office 365 APIs New Office 365 Management APIs overview  Office 365 Service Communications API reference (preview) Office 365 Management Activity API reference (preview) Office 365 APIs for Mail hands on Lab Office 365 APIs for Calendar hands on Lab File Handler hands on Lab Groups API hands on Lab Unified API hands on Lab Video API hands on Lab Updates Office 365 Groups REST API reference (preview) Video REST API reference (preview) Files REST API reference Resource reference for the Mail, Calendar and Contacts REST APIs Discovery Service REST API reference Office 365 for Enterprise Developers SharePoint Add-ins New Add custom client-side rendering to a SharePoint-hosted SharePoint Add-in Create a custom ribbon button in the host web of a SharePoint Add-in For more documentation check out Office developer documentation. Code samples Our team is continually on the lookout for new code samples to help you jump-start your own projects. Here is a list of the most recent new and updated samples from Microsoft as well as the dev community. New O365-Android-ArtCurator O365-iOS-ArtCurator O365-WinPhone-ArtCurator O365-Angular-ArtCurator Office app development—Medium article for Art Curator sample apps Most recent Office 365 Dev podcasts Since joining Microsoft last year, I have been running around campus interviewing people about various dev topics. If you would like to hear me interview someone on a particular topic, please submit your suggestions in the Yammer group, and I’ll go hunt the relevant people down to interview. Here are the most recent podcast interviews: Episode 051 on Office UI Fabric Episode 052 on client side dev with Mark Rackley Episode 053 on micro services with Bob German Episode 054 panel discussion on SharePoint development For more podcasts check out dev.office.com/podcasts. Patterns and practices The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team is working hard to release samples to show the power of SharePoint Add-ins. Don’t forget to join the monthly community calls to hear the updates from them directly on Skype for Business and the previously launched Skype Developer Platform (developer.skype.com). Here are the latest updates from the team: Updated Transform page on dev.office.com/transform Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices (PnP)—June release details PnP July community call recording at Channel 9 New training package created based on the PnP guidance at OfficeDevPnPTraining Numerous new videos in the PnP Channel 9 check at OfficeDevPnPVideos Numerous updates and new articles to PnP section in MSDN at OfficeDevPnPMSDN For more on patterns and practices check out dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices. All questions related on released materials and guidance can be added to our Yammer group at OfficeDevPnPYammer. Dev community blog posts The Office 365 dev community has been busy this month. It is exciting to see the effort people put into their posts in their spare time to share with the community. Check out these articles from the Microsoft field, MVPs and more: An early look at Cortana integration with Office 365 Microsoft Garage Tossup app Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2015 Gigjam: unleashing the human process Debugging websites with Visual Studio code by Sahil Malik SharePoint apps add-ins minify Adding Custom Tiles to the Office 365 App Launcher by Wes Hackett Inconvenient Internet Explorer security zones and Azure AD web applications by Waldek Mastykarz Header/Footer with Breadcrumb and Global Ribbon SPO Office 365 Dev Getting started with adaljs and Office 365 APIs by Scot Hillier on ITUnity Troubleshooting SharePoint Add-ins configuration on-premises by Matthew McDermott SharePoint client-side devs be heard by Marc Rackley Office 365 Video Portal API deep dive by Balamurugan Kailasam on the SharePointCommunity.net Azure Logic apps YouTube Channel 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 SPTechCon Developer Days follow Up by Marc Anderson 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 Office Store Companies across the globe are extending the value of Office every day with Office Add-ins. See how these solutions are making a difference at real companies by watching their stories on betterwith.office.com! We have two new videos for you to check out. Barnes Healthcare deploys BetterCloud to tighten management of its Office 365 platform New Signature migrates to a digital approval process with DocuSign and Office 365 Upcoming events There are plenty of events on the horizon…don’t miss out on these great events with Office 365 content. Our team looks forward to meeting you all at these events, so don’t be shy come say hello at the Office 365 booth! Aug. 18-20 SharePoint Fest, Seattle Oct. 12 Unity Connect, Amsterdam Oct. 14 DevIntersection, Amsterdam Oct. 26 DevIntersection, Las Vegas Nov. 9-12 European SharePoint conference For more events check out dev.office.com/events. Until next month, please join our community discussions at www.yammer.com/itpronetwork and follow us on @OfficeDev on Twitter and on Facebook. Also, be sure to follow along with us on our daily developer mission: Jeremy Thake (@jthake), Chris Johnson (@loungflyz), Sonya Koptyev (@SonyaKoptyev), Dave Pae (@davidpae) and Jim Epes (@j_epes). —Jeremy Thake The post Office 365—monthly Dev Digest for July appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Juliet Wei, senior product marketing manager for the Yammer team. Whether it’s drafting a proposal, updating the quarterly budget, or putting the finishing touches on a presentation, creating great content requires teams to stay on the same page. That’s why the Yammer team has been hard at work building deeper integration with Office Online, bringing the familiar interface and rich capabilities of our Office applications right into Yammer. Today, we’re excited to announce several enhancements to the Yammer files experience, making it easier than ever to incorporate document collaboration into teamwork. First, the document preview and edit experience for files uploaded into Yammer are now powered by Office Online. When you click the Edit File link in Yammer, a new browser tab opens up with a full-screen view of the document. Make changes and comments directly in the document using Office Online. When you’re done, simply close the tab. Your changes are automatically saved in Yammer, where you have the ability to review the version history of each file and mark documents "Official." In the near future, you’ll also be able to co-author documents in real-time and translate documents in Yammer into 30+ languages using the Bing Translator. Preview files in Yammer using Office Online. Click the Edit File link to launch the immersive Office Online experience. Changes made in Office Online and file version history are automatically saved to Yammer. Next, because we know teamwork often spans across companies, we’re extending document collaboration to external participants. This makes it possible to share and work on files with customers, partners and vendors using Yammer’s external messaging. PDF file previews are supported too. Finally, we’re boosting the reliability and performance of the document collaboration experience in Yammer, reaping the benefits of the foundational work we’ve been doing to integrate Yammer into Office 365. Our latest innovations bring documents to life by making it easy for teams to engage with and capture the thought process behind each piece of content. And because Yammer is open by default, others at your company can discover, use and build on that knowledge—ensuring that your team’s work lives on. Best of all, we’re turning on these latest document collaboration capabilities for all Yammer networks—new and existing, free and paid—enabling every user to preview and edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files straight from their Yammer group or conversation. So go ahead—create to your heart’s content. With Office Online and Yammer, collaborating on documents has never been simpler or more engaging. Frequently asked questions Q. When will Office Online integration with Yammer be available? A. Office Online file preview has already shipped to all Yammer users. We are planning to ship the Office Online File Edit feature to all Yammer single-users later this month. Our aim is to enable real-time co-authoring and document translation during the first half of 2016. To learn more about how to use Office Online for document collaboration in Yammer, check out this article. Q. Do I need to do anything to enable document collaboration in my Yammer network? A. There is no action required to enable Office Online capabilities within Yammer. We will have a planned service outage starting Friday, July 24, 2015 from 5:00 p.m. PDT to Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 11:59 p.m. PDT to migrate existing files in Yammer to Azure Storage Service. During this time, file editing functionality in Yammer will not be available, although other Yammer functionality, including file preview and upload, will not be affected. Once Yammer file migration occurs, we will be able to turn on Office Online single-user file edit as well as any future innovations for all Yammer users. Q. How does this fit in with Yammer’s existing document collaboration capabilities? A. The Office Online native file preview and edit capabilities inside Yammer replace the third-party service Crocodoc in its entirety. Previously, we announced the release of document conversations, which embeds Yammer conversations inside files stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. However, we’ve seen very low engagement with this feature in its current implementation. Today’s announced Office Online integration brings document collaboration into Yammer. We believe giving teams the ability to work on files in the context of their existing Yammer groups and conversations provides a more engaging and relevant experience. As such, with this latest release of document collaboration using Office Online inside Yammer, we are rolling back the current implementation of the document conversation feature, but will continue to explore other ways for users to start new Yammer conversations from files. The "Post" functionality, which lets users discuss and post files from OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online to Yammer, is a great alternative to document conversations and will not be impacted by today’s changes. The recently announced Yammer integration with Delve and the Office 365 Video Portal, which enables users to have inline Yammer conversations and share content to Yammer, will also remain available. Some networks are part of an earlier Yammer document collaboration experiment, which provides Office Online document preview, single-user editing, and multi-user co-authoring capabilities. We will be rolling back this experiment in favor of the Office Online integration announced today, which provides a more immersive, reliable and performant experience. Multi-user co-authoring will not be available in the latest implementation until 2016. —Juliet Wei The post Document collaboration in Yammer just got better with Office Online! appeared first on Office Blogs.

For a company as large, international and diverse as GE, fostering team collaboration and individual productivity are paramount. The company’s IT organization has long been recognized as an innovative and forward-thinking one in its embracing the cloud. Today, Microsoft and GE announced plans to roll out Office 365 to GE’s more than 300,000 employees across 170 countries worldwide. GE and its employees will get a comprehensive and integrated set of productivity capabilities including email, Skype for Business calling and meetings, real-time document co-authoring and team collaboration. The company will also benefit from the extensibility of the Office 365 platform, which will enable GE to enhance the capabilities of critical line-of-business applications by connecting to Office 365 through open APIs. And the IT organization values the IT controls and security capabilities built right into Office 365. Read more about GE’s decision to choose Office 365 in today’s press release and over on the Business Matters blog. The post GE selects Office 365 for employee collaboration and productivity appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for Office 365 and Outlook. Gartner recently published the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways, positioning Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant. The Magic Quadrant represents Gartner’s evaluation of our completeness of vision and ability to execute in the market. We believe this positioning is a reflection of the value we’re delivering to our customers and the strength of our product vision. Microsoft has a number of services that are evaluated in this report including: Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Office 365 Message Encryption, which are part of the Office 365 suite and include other security and compliance services as well. Continuous service enhancements Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is an integral part of Office 365, providing native protection for hundreds of millions of Office 365 mailboxes. EOP is also used by thousands of large enterprises to protect tens of millions of on-premises mailboxes. Our top priority is delivering new value to our customers in an evolving security landscape while continuing to strengthen our core protection capabilities. During the past year, we’ve been focused on strengthening protection against phishing, malware and spam attacks. Significant advancements include developing near-real-time protection against high-volume spam campaigns, providing support for inbound DKIM and DMARC to reinforce our anti-phishing and anti-spoofing protection, and empowering administrators to adjust the bulk mail experience for their organizations. We’ve also shipped Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), providing robust protection against "zero-day" attachments and real-time protection of users against harmful links. We’ve enhanced our Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities and extended them beyond email. We introduced DLP capabilities natively in Office client and expanded DLP coverage to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. With Compliance Center, we’re providing administrators a simple, centralized policy management console to create their DLP policies that can be applied across different services. We have continuously added new features to Office 365 Message Encryption. With "one time passcode," the recipient of an encrypted message simply enters a passcode to read it. We also shipped new mobile apps on iOS and Android to view encrypted messages easily while on the go. To expand our commitment to filtering emails within a region of customer choice, we rolled out Exchange Online Protection in Japan, Australia and our U.S. Government Community Cloud. This steady stream of service enhancements is a key benefit of Office 365 and part of Microsoft’s continuous commitment to building world-class security capabilities. Our vision for the future In light of escalating attacks on enterprise, governmental, educational and other institutions, it’s essential that we continue to expand the capabilities of these services. In the next year, we will focus on strengthening protection against external threats; empowering administrators to prevent data loss; streamlining administration of the solution; and expanding its coverage to a broader set of Office 365 workloads, including SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business and Yammer. In the near to mid-term future our roadmap includes many new features—here are a few: Innovations in protection against external threats Strengthened anti-phishing, anti-spoofing and anti-malware (especially zero-day) capabilities. Advancing customer-specific protection based on implicit behavior and signals from customers’ users (in addition to currently supported explicit administrators’ configuration and users’ Allow/Block lists). Dynamic delivery, as part of ATP, eliminates latency in email delivery while the email attachment is being inspected in a sandboxed environment. This capability will deliver the original email with a "placeholder" attachment—after passing inspection, the original attachment(s) will be reconnected to the original email in the mailbox. During this process, the user will be informed that the attachment is being scanned. Data Loss Prevention We will bring DLP to Office Clients (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) with Office 2016. Our capabilities for DLP for SharePoint will get an enhanced feature set. Office 365 Message Encryption will support Revocation and Message Expiration capabilities, as well as track whether a message was read by a recipient. Office 365 Message Encryption support for Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). Expanded global presence We will continue expanding our service’s global presence in addition to the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia Pacific (APAC), Japan, Australia and China, and plan to offer local email processing in India and Canada. We look forward to delivering more innovation in this space and look forward to your continued feedback. — Rajesh Jha Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways, Peter Firstbrook, Neil Wynne, 29 June 2015Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The post Microsoft positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways appeared first on Office Blogs.

With Office Mix, you can teach a lesson and quiz viewers to gauge their comprehension, which any educator will tell you is key to the learning process. But imagine if your ability to write quiz questions was limited to what you could type on the common QWERTY keyboard. How would you ask questions about mathematical and scientific formulae? E equals MC squared isn’t as recognizable or efficient as E = MC2, which you can type easily in any Office document that allows you to include symbols and superscripts. Up until recently, the best you could do in an Office Mix quiz or poll was to type E = MC2, which even a grade school student knows isn’t the same thing. The more complex the formula, the less satisfying the results. But now, with WYSIWIG editing support in quizzes and polls, you can type formulae as simple as E = MC2 or as complex as: If you’re a math or science teacher, the benefits are clear—and here’s just one example of the type of Office Mix quiz you can create now: But even if you’re not a math or science teacher, you now have a lot more freedom to include images, tables, horizontal rule lines, font formatting, bulleted and numbered lists, and a whole range of special characters in quiz and poll questions in your Office Mix—thanks to the new floating toolbar that appears when you author a question: For a complete list of available commands and instructions on how to use them, visit "Introducing WYSIWYG editing in quizzes and polls" at the Office Mix feedback and support site. The post WYSIWYG editing in Office Mix quizzes and polls appeared first on Office Blogs.

Earlier this year, we started the rollout of built-in Mobile Device Management (MDM) for Office 365, and now that it has been available for a while, we want to give you some tips on how to get the feature up and running in your organization. It’s easy to get started—there are just a few steps, which are documented in detail here: Overview built-in Mobile Device Management (MDM) for Office 365. Set up MDM for Office 365—Activate the feature and configure the environment. Configure MDM policies—Configure Security Groups and Device policies. Enroll devices—When users access Exchange, SharePoint or OneDrive using the MDM-enabled applications, they are required to enroll their devices. Manage devices—You can wipe enrolled devices and run reports. Set up MDM for Office 365 None of your users will be affected by setting up MDM until you configure the MDM policies. So to get started, go to the Office 365 Admin Center, and from the Mobile Devices tab, click Get started. Depending on the size of your Office 365 tenant, it may only take a few minutes, or it could take a few hours, to activate the feature. In the background, we configure Azure Active Directory and Intune for your users and devices. This is all transparent to you—since you’ll be managing everything from Office 365. You don’t need to wait at this page for the process to complete. Come back when you are ready, and once the feature is activated, you’ll be able to continue the configuration. You only need to configure a few tenant-wide settings, and you can access them from the Manage Settings link. Set up an Apple Push Notification Service certificate to manage iOS devices and configure any custom domains to support MDM for Windows devices. How MDM Conditional Access works MDM policies are applied to groups of users (it will affect all of the user’s devices) and they can enforce Conditional Access to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business through any of the supported mobile applications. Conditional Access works like this: when a user logs into Office 365 through a supported mobile app, the app checks with Azure Active Directory to see if the user is subject to a Conditional Access policy. If the user has a policy assigned, and the device is not marked as enrolled and compliant, the application prompts the user to enroll the device in MDM. In the case of an Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) client, Exchange sends an email with a link to enroll. Once the user has enrolled the device, the device settings policies are sent to the device, and the user must update the device to meet the appropriate settings such as PIN and encryption. After the settings are updated, the agent on the device informs the management service, which in turn marks the user’s device as enrolled and compliant in Azure Active Directory. Configure MDM policies You will want to start by setting up your first policy for a test group of users—you could start with just yourself in the group or add a few eager friends who want to help with the testing, to evaluate the effect on your environment and understand the device enrollment process. The MDM policies can only be applied to security groups (not distribution groups), so set up a security group (through Office 365 or Exchange) for your test group of users (or use one you already have). To create an MDM policy, select the Manage device security policies and access rules link, which takes you to the Compliance Center, where all the policies for your Office 365 tenant are managed. The list of policy settings on the first page (What requirements do you want to have on devices?) lists the requirements that need to be met before the user’s device is considered to be compliant. A couple of important notes on a few of the settings: Setting Notes Require data encryption on devices For Android devices this requires the user to encrypt the device through settings,and this can take some time. Require managing email profile This sends an email profile from Exchange Online to iOS devices. If a user already has an email profile connected to Exchange Online defined on the device, they will have to remove that profile before they are marked as compliant. Allow access versus Block access The last section (If a device doesn’t meet the requirements above, then…) determines how devices are treated when they connect. In both cases, users are prompted to enroll their devices before they can connect to Exchange, SharePoint or OneDrive. However, in the Allow case, the device does not have to be made compliant with the settings before access is granted. In the Block case, the user will not be able to access Office 365 until the device complies with any settings on this page of the policy. This option cannot be changed when updating a policy later—if you want to change the setting from Allow to Block later, you will have to re-create the policy. The second page (What else do you want to configure?) has a list of device settings. These settings are pushed down to the device but are not used when calculating whether a device is compliant, and will not stop a device from connecting to Office 365. The final step is to apply the policy to your group of test users. When you apply a policy to a security group, you need to search for the name of the group (Hint: * will display all groups, or search for the first few letters of the group name). Once you have created the policy, the status of the policy is "Turning on…." while it distributes the policy to the right systems and changes to "On" once it has completed the policy distribution. Enroll devices MDM policies can be triggered when any of the supported Office applications are used on iOS or Android devices. Make sure you have the latest version of the application. When you sign in with your Office 365 credentials (you must be in a Security group that has a policy applied), you will see this enrollment prompt: When you tap the Enroll button, you are prompted to download the Intune Company Portal application. Log in to the application and enroll your device. Once all of the required steps are completed, the MDM device settings are sent to the device, and for any settings that haven’t already been configured, you are prompted to configure them. Simply open the Company Portal app and select Check Compliance to determine if all the settings have been configured correctly. If not, the Company Portal provides a link with remediation steps. When you tap the Enroll button, you are prompted to download the Intune Company Portal application. Log in to the application and enroll your device. Once all of the required steps are completed, the MDM device settings are sent to the device, and for any settings that haven’t already been configured, you are prompted to configure them. Simply open the Company Portal app and select Check Compliance to determine if all the settings have been configured correctly. If not, the Company Portal provides a link with remediation steps. Once the device is compliant, you restart the Office application and connect to Office 365. MDM policies can also be triggered by using any native email client, which connects using EAS from iOS, Android or Windows Phone 8.1. When you connect to Exchange Online, you receive a message similar to this: Select the Enroll your device link to go through the same enrollment process (assuming you are not already enrolled) as the Enroll button displayed from the Office applications. Once your device is enrolled and compliant (you can use the second link in the email to check), you also need to click the activate your email link to send the EASid to Active Directory. For Windows Phone 8.1, there’s no Company Portal to install. Just follow the instructions to add a workplace account. If you have previously connected to Exchange on this same device, then it may take up to 24 hours before your Quarantine mail is received—this is a result of the Exchange service caching your previous compliance status, which was most likely "no policy applies" since this is the first time you have any MDM policies defined. Manage devices The Mobile devices page in Office 365 lists all the devices that have enrolled into the MDM service for your tenant. From this list you see details of the devices, as well as issue wipe commands. Office 365 gives you two different wipe options: Full wipe—Restores the device to its factory settings, deleting all data on a user’s mobile device. Selective wipe—Removes only organization data and leaves installed applications, photos and personal information on a user’s mobile device. For MDM for Office 365, the selective wipe option will remove the following organizational data: Outlook for iOS and Android OneDrive for iOS and Android EAS mail for iOS (if the policy option Require managing email profile was defined) For the other applications that access Office 365 data, and specifically for EAS mail on other devices (or on iOS when the manage email profile policy option was not selected), new access is blocked until the device is re-enrolled, however, existing data is not removed. From the Office 365 Admin Center, you can also see device compliance reports to display information about the number of devices in your organization that have connected to your environment. Next steps Once you’ve tried out MDM for Office 365 with a policy for you and your closest friends, you can educate your users, create additional policies for them (perhaps you need different settings for different groups), and sleep just a little more soundly now that your Office 365 data is better protected. Want more? MDM for Office 365 has a subset of the features of Intune (see the differences here). So if you are looking for protection beyond what’s included in Office 365, you can subscribe to Microsoft Intune, part of the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, and receive additional device and application management capabilities for phones, tablets and PCs. This includes the ability to restrict actions such as cut, copy, paste and save as to applications managed by Intune—helping keep corporate information even more secure. If you want to use both Intune and MDM for Office 365 within the same Office 365 tenant, we don’t support that for all tenants just yet—but you can contact the support team, and we may be able to get you set up as part of our private preview program. By the way, I talked about using Office 365 MDM at the Ignite Conference in May, so if want to see the product in action, watch the video from the conference. Try out MDM for Office 365 and let us know what you think! —Astrid McClean, senior program manager for the Office 365 Information Protection team. The post Explore the built-in Mobile Device Management (MDM) feature for Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today we are excited to announce the launch of the Office 365 Channels on IFTTT to coordinate information flow in an automated way. IFTTT enables people to link to the various Triggers that exist for Internet apps, and then complete Actions against other products or apps. For example, you could have the lights in your house turn on when you are minutes from your house. The Office 365 Channels include: Mail OneDrive for Business Calendar Contacts When you activate these Channels, you are able to automate what happens with your Office 365 data to increase your productivity even more. For example, you create Recipes to program activities, like automatically save a photo to OneDrive for Business when it’s posted to Instagram with a particular hashtag, or sharing that a new Office 365 contact was added to the team’s Trello board or Slack team. We created some Office 365 sample Recipes to help you get started. Mail Channel We live in our email these days. The Mail Channel helps you create a centralized place to review of all of the information coming in from across the Internet. For example, this Recipe sends an email when you receive a refund in Square: OneDrive for Business Channel We all like to share highlights of our successes to our friends and peers. This Recipe saves a photo from your Camera Roll on your iPhone to your OneDrive for Business if you’re within a particular radius of a location. This is a great way to automatically save all conference-related and team-building photos to your team’s OneDrive for Business photos folder: Another great Recipe uses Instagram photos with the #work hashtag. For example, this Recipe saves photos from Instagram to OneDrive for Business to create a great #work photo album and share conference and team activity pictures with the rest of the team: Calendar Channel The Calendar Channel, keeps you on top of your meetings and important events all the time. This Recipe creates a card in your team’s Trello board, reminding them of a team meeting, and then adds a task to follow up with meeting notes: Or use the Calendar Channel to schedule a gym appointment for you for in the evening when you haven’t reached your FitBit steps goal by 5 p.m. Contacts Channel Keeping track of relationships and key contacts is critical today. This Recipe creates a page in your OneNote when you add a new contact to Office 365: This next Recipe creates an automatic follow-up calendar item for an easy reminder to follow up with a new contact a week after your initial meeting: Get started today by visiting the Microsoft’s profile page on IFTTT, where we’ve posted 30 recipes to help you get started. We’re looking forward to seeing the creative ways you can increase your productivity with IFTTT and Office 365. The post Office 365 Channels are live on IFTTT appeared first on Office Blogs.

Sometimes you just need to send a quick, short note to your co-worker. Of course, you can use Outlook for this, but today we’re launching a new app through the Microsoft Garage that is built specifically for those brief, snappy communications—Send, designed for in-and-out email. Send is available for iPhone in the U.S. and Canada, and is coming soon to Windows Phone and Android phones. The app works for people with Office 365 business and school email accounts, and we expect to make the app more broadly available in the coming months. While tools like text messaging and IM are great for short messages, you often don’t have your co-worker’s cell phone number or an IM app on your work phone. And we’ve heard loud and clear from people at work, they want all their communications available in Outlook—even if they send them from other apps. This is where Send comes in! Send gives you the simple, quick text message-like experience while allowing you to reach all co-workers and have all of your communications in Outlook for reference later. Send lets you quickly and easily send any co-worker a message without a subject line or formal email constructs. Some examples of Send messages include: Straight to the point: "Let’s chat in 10" Super urgent: "Don’t send the presentation yet" Simple back-and-forth conversations: "Are you in the Office today?" "No" These are the sort of quick emails you send to the people you care about at work—your boss, your teammates, and sometimes partners or customers outside your organization. You’re usually busy or on the go when you send them, and Send is specifically designed for this get-in get-out scenario. Imagine you’re walking into a big presentation and someone asks you to find out if your colleague will be attending. Chances are, you don’t have your colleague’s phone number, but you will probably have their email address—especially if you’ve been emailing with them recently. You don’t have time to search your inbox, start a new thread, or even type out a subject line. You just want to ask that person, "Will you be at the presentation?" With Send, there are no signatures, subject lines or salutations required. Our design principle for the app was to make conversations fast and fluid while keeping the people who are important to you at its core. Send connects to Office 365 business and school email accounts to surface your frequent and recent contacts. The people who are important to you are put right at your fingertips—just tap on a contact to start a conversation. Or even better, simply swipe and choose a Quick Reply such as "On my way" or "I’ll get back to you." You can also see when someone is typing their response; there’s never been a quicker way to reach someone over email. Send doesn’t show all your emails, just the ones started in the app, keeping you in control. All Send messages comply with your organization’s email compliance policies—they are treated like any other work email. And for IT Pros, we’re working on bringing more IT controls to the app in the coming months. The connection with Office 365 means your conversations are synced with Outlook, letting you continue the conversation from anywhere. And just like regular email, you can message anyone with an email address. No need to exchange numbers, remember usernames or split conversations across platforms. Now that you know a little bit about Send, we’d love to hear what you have to say. We’re listening to your feedback, which you can submit under the Help section of the app. We’ve added a FAQ section to the Office 365 Network on Yammer, and you can join us for a YamJam on Tuesday, July 28th 9-10 a.m. PDT to ask questions about the app. To join the YamJam: Request access to the Office 365 Network. Join the Send app group. You can find it by using the Browse Groups function or through the search bar. Log in at 9 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, July 28th to ask questions and provide feedback about Send. If you are using Office 365 for your work or school email, we encourage you to try Send on iPhone and let us know what you think. You can also check out more productivity apps at the Microsoft Garage. The post Introducing Send—designed for in-and-out email appeared first on Office Blogs.

Shobhit Sahay is a technical product manager on the Office 365 team. Earlier this year, we announced we are deeply committed to bringing encryption technologies on all platforms. At the core of encryption technologies is Azure Rights Management, which provides an easy way to protect data by assigning a policy to the data readily available in Office 2013, Office 2010 and Office for Mac. We are excited to announce that the same policy-driven protection is now available in Office for iPad and on iPhone devices. With this functionality, you are now able to view the rights protected Office documents natively on your iPad and iPhone devices. Let’s look at this functionality in greater detail: While using Office documents on iPad and iPhone, you can now view rights protected documents natively within the Office application. Word, Excel and PowerPoint all display the protected content with full file fidelity, retaining the same viewing rights permissions originally assigned to the document. While you can view the rights protected documents with this release, the capability to create, edit and publish rights protected documents will be released at a later date. Rights protected document viewed on the iPad. Rights protected document viewed on the iPhone. Our promise to bring Azure Rights Management to all platforms While we are excited about bringing Azure Rights Management to Office for iPad and iPhone, we are continuously working to enable the same for other Office applications on different platforms: Outlook app on iOS and Android will start supporting Azure Rights Management in the fourth quarter of 2015. Office Mobile will support Azure Rights Management with the Windows 10 Enterprise release in the fourth quarter of 2015. Office 2016 will come pre-instrumented with Azure Rights Management controls later this calendar year. The rights management experience is going to get richer on Office for iPad and iPhone, with support for creating, editing and publishing rights protected documents coming in a later release. Office for Android will also support Azure Rights Management in the fourth quarter of 2015. We believe that providing you with such rights management controls will help you protect your data wherever you may be using the Office applications. We look forward to your feedback and releasing new enhancements in the coming months. For more news about other announcements from Azure this week, click here. —Shobhit Sahay Frequently asked questions Q. When are the Office apps updated for this capability? A. The updated Office apps will be available in the Apple App Store by July 23, 2015. You can then update the apps on your device and start using the functionality. Q. Can a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document be rights protected from within the Office apps on an iPad or iPhone? A. The current release will support only viewing of rights protected Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents on an iPad or iPhone. Creating rights protected content on iPads and iPhones will be supported later. Q. Will the recipient be able to edit a rights protected document if the sender gives that permission? A. This is not supported today but will be available in a later release. The post Azure Rights Management support comes to Office for iPad and iPhone appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services team. On June 24, we launched Office for Android phone, and the response has been amazing. In the last three weeks, there have been millions of downloads across Google Play, Samsung Galaxy and local app stores in China. We are also excited to see customers rate the apps so favorably, now at 4+ ratings on the Google Play store. Thanks to you all for using the Office apps. We very much appreciate your feedback (the positive and the critical!) and have been reading all of your comments posted to the launch blog, within the App Stores, and submitted directly via the product. While we’ve been answering these questions across the various forums, we thought it would be helpful to consolidate, share and answer the top questions here on the Office Blog. 1. Will Office for Android apps be supported on any OS version below KitKat (4.4)? The new Office for Android apps supports only KitKat (4.4) or higher. For customers running older Android OS versions, we are continuing to provide the original "Office Mobile for Android" app in the Google Play store. 2. When will the apps support the new Android M OS? The Android M OS is still in preview, and we plan to support it within 2-3 weeks of general availability. 3. I have the old Office Mobile app on my Android phone. Can I keep using it? Of course! Existing users of the previous Office Mobile app can keep using it on their Android phones. However, we recommend that existing users with more modern Android phones running 4.4 OS (KitKat) or higher download and use the new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps. 4. What is the market and language availability for the apps? Currently the Office for Android apps are available in the following languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (U.S.), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Latin), Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish and Ukrainian. Here is the list of countries where the Office for Android apps are currently available. 5. When will the apps be available in Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left languages? They are coming soon! We have heard your feedback and will be delivering the Office for Android apps in local languages and regions with requirements for right-to-left (RTL) languages and Complex Script (CS) this fall. We plan to provide bi-directional, switchable text support in canvas, vertical text support, justification support, and translation for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai in the app experience. We’ll also localize all the text in the UI and "mirror" the UI, that is, move the command from left-to-right to right-to-left. The apps will be available in the following languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Indic languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam), Persian, Vietnamese and Thai; and in these markets: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, UAE, Vietnam and Yemen. 6. Do I need an Office 365 subscription to use the Office for Android phone apps? The answer is "it depends." For consumers (or what we refer to as "non-commercial use"), we provide core viewing, creation and editing features of Office for Android phone at no charge. There are a few advanced features that are only available for Office 365 subscribers, and you can find the list here. For businesses and commercial users, viewing and printing are free, but you will need a qualifying Office 365 subscription for rights to create and edit documents. A list of qualifying Office 365 subscriptions can be found here. A few months ago, I posted a blog on our business model and licensing approach for mobile apps. You can read that here for more details. 7. Can I use this app without signing in? You can view documents without signing in. However, we recommend signing in with a Microsoft Account (MSA) or qualified Office 365 subscription ID to unlock core editing functionality. Based on user feedback, we have simplified the sign-up process, so you can now create an MSA and sign in to the apps in three easy steps. BTW… signing in to any of the apps (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) automatically signs you in to all three apps. 8. How do I request my favorite feature? We definitely want your feedback and it absolutely impacts our backlog! You can always submit your feature request on our brand new suggestion box sites: word.uservoice.com, excel.uservoice.com, powerpoint.uservoice.com, outlook.uservoice.com and onenote.uservoice.com. 9. I have a technical issue. Where do I go? Get support at support.office.com/home/contact. Alternatively, you can inform us about any issue directly from the product using the feedback tool in the top right corner (the smiley face). Thanks to everyone who has taken time to share comments—we appreciate it. Please keep sending us your questions and feedback and together we’ll keep making the Office apps for Android better. —Kirk Koenigsbauer The post Your top questions about Office for Android phone answered appeared first on Office Blogs.

Editor’s note 8/17/2015: The blog post was updated to reflect the upcoming availability of Skype for Business in 2016. Editor’s note 7/28/2015: We updated this post to reflect that support for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai language documents on iPad and iPhone was delivered on July 23, 2015. The Office apps for iPad and iPhone are now available in the Office App Store in Arab countries, Israel and Thailand. Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services team. The response to last week’s release of Office 2016 for Mac has been amazing—thank you to all our customers! The post was one of the most read and shared Office Blog posts this year, receiving hundreds of great comments and questions. We thought it would be helpful to share the top questions and answers with you. 1. Where do I get Office 2016 for Mac? Office 2016 for Mac is currently only available for Office 365 subscription customers. It will be available via one-time purchase in late September. In the meantime, here are the instructions on how you can get Office 2016 for Mac today: Office 365 subscribers—On your Mac, 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. Non-Office 365 subscribers—Visit office.com/mac to learn about ways to purchase an Office 365 subscription, either for you or your organization. Students—You may get Office 2016 for Mac for free or at a substantial discount. You can find out at office.com/student. 2. When will Office 2016 for Mac be available for people and businesses who don’t want a subscription? For businesses, Volume Licensing customers will be able to download Office 2016 for Mac from their Volume Licensing Service Center in early August. For consumers, Office 2016 for Mac will become available as a one-time purchase option in late September. Additionally, MSDN subscribers will also be able to get the new Office for Mac in September. 3. When will the Office 2016 for Mac preview stop working? We are extending the use of the Office 2016 for Mac preview until the end of October, in large part based on your feedback. Originally, we planned to let the Office for Mac preview expire on August 9, 2015, 30 days after launch. However, several customers commented that this was before the availability of the one-time purchase version in September, leaving some preview participants without Office 2016 for weeks. As a result of this feedback, we are extending the life of the preview until the end of October. This will give preview participants about one month to move to Office 2016 as a one-time purchase, or over three months for those who want an Office 365 subscription. 4. Can I use Office 2016 for Mac and Office for Mac 2011 on the same Mac? Yes, you can use them side-by-side on the same Mac. And by the way, here’s how you add the app icons for Office 2016 to the dock. 5. When will OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business for Mac be available? OneDrive for Business will be available before the end of the year and Skype for Business in 2016. Stay tuned to the Office Blog if you want to participate in the preview of Skype and OneDrive. 6. I have a technical problem. Where do I go? The best place to start is support.office.com/home/contact. Otherwise you can let us know if there is something you like or don’t like by clicking the "send a smile/frown" right from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote or Outlook. 7. How can I request a new feature? You can submit your feature request on the new suggestion box service for each application: word.uservoice.com, excel.uservoice.com, powerpoint.uservoice.com, outlook.uservoice.com and onenote.uservoice.com. 8. I’m having problems with Outlook connectivity and reliability. What’s happening? A number of customers reported hangs or crashes in Outlook 2016 for Mac. The Outlook team is aware of these issues and has identified two specific issues along with their root cause. In one, a small subset of customers saw frequent crashes due to some optimization work that the Outlook team was performing. The other involved hangs for customers with multiple IMAP or POP accounts. Fixes for both issues will be released this week, and customers will be automatically notified by Microsoft AutoUpdate. We’ve also heard the requests for Gmail and iCloud calendar and contacts sync. We’ll be adding these and other feature requests through monthly updates. Stay tuned to the Office Blog for further updates as we finalize our plans here. 9. What are your plans for Visual Basic support? Existing macros continue to work in Office 2016 for Mac. When accessing local files, you may encounter permission prompts due to Mac OS X sandboxing. We’ve added methods to the object model to allow you to update macros to minimize the number of prompts. Office 2016 for Mac provides a simplified Visual Basic Editor (VBE) for viewing/debugging existing macros. We recommend that customers develop macros or VB add-ins in Office for Windows and use Office for Mac to debug if needed. We will continue to ensure compatibility of existing macros and make improvements to the IDE. In the future, we will include the new web-based add-in model in Office for Mac products, which work across devices and platforms, giving add-in developers a modern web development experience. These new add-ins are already available in Outlook for Mac today and will come to the rest of Office for Mac over time. They are available today for Office for Windows for Word and Excel on iPad. 10. When will Office 2016 for Mac be available in Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left languages? What about other languages? We’ve heard your feedback and questions about right-to-left (RTL) language support. We are committed to doing RTL languages for Office for Mac. We are currently working through timing and will communicate our plans when we have a clearer sense of the timeline. Support for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai language documents on iPad and iPhone was delivered on July 23, 2015. The Office apps for iPad and iPhone are now available in the Office App Store in Arab countries, Israel and Thailand. And we will release additional updates for RTL languages shortly after the iOS 9 release. More broadly, Office for Mac is currently available in the following 16 languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. And Office 2016 for Mac is available in all countries where Office 365 is available except for Turkey. Office for Mac will be available in Turkey in September when the Turkish language version is ready. Thank you again for the incredible response to Office 2016 for Mac. The team is already hard at work on the first update for Office 365 customers. We’ll share more information soon. Please keep sending us your questions, feedback and suggestions—it’s very helpful as we prioritize the backlog to create the best Office for Mac experience for you! —Kirk Koenigsbauer The post Your top 10 questions about Office 2016 for Mac answered appeared first on Office Blogs.