Office 365 Tips & Tricks

Brass Contributor

Hello All !

 

As part of an ongoing adoption program on Office 365, we will soon start bi-weekly tips and tricks to our end-users that we have named "2 minutes to Learn".

 

After some brainstorming and research, we have come up with 12 ideas of tips and tricks advocating the use of online / mobile O365 services :

  • Gather feedback with Excel Survey
  • Never lose your 'My Documents'
  • Send documents to externals securely
  • Create a document together in real-time
  • Share central meeting notes with your team
  • Recover Office documents from computer crashes
  • Search for expertise or knowledge with Delve
  • Manage tasks collaboratively with Planner
  • Video on Power Maps for Excel
  • Using the Morph transition on PPT
  • Video on Office Lens
  • Video on Microsoft Stream
  • Streamlining 1:1s with OneNote
  • OneNote whiteboarding in meetings

I was wondering if some of you had already done those kind of tips and tricks and would have other ideas of topics ? And/or recommendations on the format (so far I have Pain points / Gains / Video demo / Sucess stories) ?

 

For most of those general use cases, we will work with the different departments to come up with what they mean for them in their daily activities (e.g. "Gather feedback with Excel Survey" becomes "Collect training evaluation forms instantly - for Human resources").

If some of you are willing to share business use cases and drivers of using Office365 for specific department, let's connect !

 

Some useful resources for inspiration found so far are Bettercloud Monitor / Office365 Ninjas and the Office Champions Youtube videos.

 

Thanks a lot for your help !

Pierrick Barreau

Head of IT Adoption & Leverage @ LDC

5 Replies

This sounds like a good program in the making.  I like the practical nature of these tasks/tips and that they can be tailored for each group.  

 

One idea, you might have something like this already but is an adoption site using the new SharePoint Communication Sites as discussed here - SharePoint Communications Sites for your Office 365 Adoption Site

 

For ideas on business scenarios, check out the Productivity Library if you aren't familiar with it, that can be filtered by Industry, Roles, or Products.  There is a lot of ready-made resources on the site.

 

Do you have champions, with staff that can drive and spread Office 365 knowledge alongside these sorts of initiatives?  Are you aware of the Adoption Guide already, that has lots of great info.  Also are you familiar with the Office 365 Adoption content pack? That could give you some good metrics on how well Office 365 is being utilised and may shine a light on services that are being underused. This could allow you to measure any improvements in the subsequent months.

 

What will the main call to action be, as you want staff to go off and put these skills into practice? Having a contest or some other activities around this, could promote some healthy competition between departments etc.

 

Those were just a few thoughts anyway, I'd be interested in what other members have to say! Oh incidentally, Excel Survey has been renamed to Forms for Excel.

Hello @Pierrick Barreau , I love meeting people who care about their end users and actually work actively to increase adoption in their organization. 

 

It's a good list of topics that you have gathered. The specific topics that would work best depend very much on the needs of your departments. I see that you are already planning to work with different departments. That's definitely the right thing to do (from my own experience as well).

 

As far as the format of the content... Videos, Walkthroughs and annotated screenshots are my favorite. Also, if possible, provide these things/the help in-context to the user's environment in addition to the bi-weekly tips that you are planning. Contextual help has been known to work the best to increase user adoption.

 

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

https://www.useloom.com/share/db333f85a87344989ee184adc7951145

 

Best wishes.

Asif

Hello @Cian Allner,

Thanks a lot for all the good inputs.

 

We will indeed group the use cases collected from our brainstorming with the different department into our own Productivity library, probably a Communication site as you mentionned (we are waiting for it to be released in our tenant ... the joy to have a European tenant :-))

 

For the moment, we have OneDrive champions, but a limited community and more tech-savvy than business-oriented. So I agree with you, we need to consider the reinforcement of that network. The brainstorming sessions will hopefully allow us to identify good candidates. Otherwise, I agree with you the Adoption pack with PowerBI is a great tool to identify pockets of key users.

 

Regarding what we expect end-users to do, we are going to use newsletters and blend the content into our LMS courses in order to touch end-users at the right time when they need information. A use case contest with awards and goodies is a great idea that we planned to use after the roll-out of our "Productivity library" in order to collect even more use cases and success stories. But for the moment, I am not sure what route to take regards the gamification mechanisms. Any hints ?

 

Thanks a lot for the heads up on Forms for Excel !

Our tenant being European, it is still called Excel Survey so I had not noticed the name change :)

Thanks for the pointer @Asif Rehmani !

Contextual help is definitely a much-needed training tool.

I will look at Visual SP thanks !

 

We also reviewed Iorad and are in the process of reviewing Toonimo.

Anyone used those tools for Change Management ?

I would also consider topics on how to use the plethora of Mobile Apps that Microsoft has added.  From Office to OneDrive to Groups and Teams...these provide a wealth of functionality for people on the go.  You might do this by exploring a scenario where a person has to travel or attend to a personal off-site issue and can still get their work done by proper use of the mobile suite.