Forum Discussion
Notifying Users about New Features
- Feb 17, 2019
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.
I do a monthly newsletter called "Two Tip Tuesday" - I pick two of the latest feature enhancements to showcase. I try to keep it short - but provide links of where people can get more information - or training (we also use QuickHelp). I have branded this using my dog Stuart who has become my official O365 mascot. I use him on everything I do. People are more likely to read something that has a cute dog on it. I attached the first Two Tip Tuesday I did. We started out doing these weekly for a month as a pilot and then did a survey asking what people thought. The majority thought weekly was too often - so we changed it to monthly. As a follow up I also do a monthly AMA "ask me anything" session with our executive admins where they can come with questions - or we go through what I sent in the Two Tip Tuesday in more details. I'd like to start doing this as a video blog to share with everyone - but as we are multi language it becomes more challenging. Yes I know I can use stream to do the transcript and do subtitles - but it still isn't the same.
I also have a Yammer group - Help O365 that I post to. As well as having an Early Adopter Teams area that includes not only our entire IT organization but also business process owners. This is the group that gets all new things applied to them after the technical team but before the general population.
I have also utilized the Bookings tool within O365 to allow people to schedule 1 on 1 assistance with me.
- Dean_GrossMay 10, 2019Silver Contributorthat is a wonderful idea, thanks for sharing. I'm going to ask my customer if they want to do something like this.
- Asif RehmaniMay 10, 2019MVP
Wow. These are pretty nice ideas you have implemented Allison Koch . Thanks for sharing!
I'll throw in another thing here regarding notifying users about new features.
Too many emails go ignored these days. Instead, I prefer trying to catch users' attention when they are in the environment and working on their tasks.
For example, not too long ago, Microsoft pushed out new interfaces for Outlook Online. The scenario we put together for notifying users about that change is that next time they went to Outlook, it would provide them with this walkthrough bubble that would show up automatically:
Then when they click on the Done button, the analytics would be populated in the backend showing which users have seen it. IMHO, this is so much better than an email campaign which may or may not get users attention.