Forum Discussion
Notifying Users about New Features
You have a few options to notify users that I've used:
- Create a channel in Teams dedicated to RSS feeds. I have a channel that dumps in various O365 and Microsoft Blog updates.
- If possible, hold either some lunch and learns or a Genius Bar type setup in a common area of your office where you can answer questions and demo a new feature or capability.
- Create a champions group within your organization. A group of IT and Business colleagues that are excited by new technology and looking to improve their workflow and dive positive change in the company. If they are aware of new features, they will filter it down to their colleagues and it will spread socially from there.
Dean_Gross I was in the exact same boat you were. The biggest problem I had was where do I get all of the information that was out there.
So what I did was setup flow to follow a couple of different feeds and post them to different locations (Yammer, Internal Blog and Teams). For example, one of the feeds I followed was the Office 365 Roadmap and started posting updates to my blog.
Aside from there being WAY to many updates (that is a whole other rant 😃) it really helped me get a handle on what was coming down the pipe. So much that I started feeding everything into that.
Another option that might be an option is feeding the updates that come into the O365 admin center into Teams. We starting doing that at the company I am with now and it really lets us know what is coming right around the corner. The only problem with that one, is for big organizations ... it might not be enough notice!
Hope that helps!
Mike Dumka thanks Mike - I've seen other people recommend using flow to dump knowledge into TEAMS. Do you or anyone else have a quick blog about setting that up with some tips and tricks maybe?
Here is an example of what I did for the Office 365 Roadmap
Example Flow for O365 RoadmapWhat did I do?
- I always start with the RSS feed source
- I always send myself rather than a mobile notification (just because there are so many updates 😃)
- Then I post that update to the platform of choice. I use Twitter and Wordpress, but there are so many different choices like Yammer, Teams, SharePoint ... etc.
What did I learn?
- I originally started to use IFTTT but found that they did not have deep enough integration into Office 365 to "publish" information, Like Yammer, Teams, SharePoint ... etc.
- I used to post the contents of the updates from the feed (called "Feed summary" in Flow) but you can't format the contents so depending on the source you may have nicely formatted content, or you may just have 1 line. So I just went with the link.
- Another reason I did not use the "Feed Summary" is sometimes the content is the whole article! I wanted the person who wrote the content to get the view so I just linked to it.
What did I learn? (Office 365 Roadmap & Twitter)
- Last but not least but this one needs calling out, with the Office 365 Roadmap RSS feed. They post a TON of updates and they are so many duplicates, triplicates and quadruplicates. I am making the assumption this happens because:
- Things are always changing (which is good 👍)
- The RSS feed may not be setup properly (but I am no RSS expert) as even spelling corrections show up as "updates", this does not happen on the other RSS feeds I follow
- Because of Twitters terms of service, you can't post duplicates close together because it looks automated (which it is) so you will get Flow fail errors. This is why I put it at the bottom of the Flow so the other content can at least get out.
Hope that helps,
Let me know if you run into any snags!
