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Maddie_Egan
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Joined Jul 01, 2016
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Office 365 October news—exciting new value coming to Windows 10
Today, Microsoft announced the Windows 10 Creators Update coming in early 2017, as well as stunning new devices: Surface Studio, Surface Dial and Surface Book with Performance Base. At the event today, Satya Nadella, Terry Myerson and Panos Panay showcased innovations to the Office apps that are coming first to Windows and brought to life on Surface. These advances make using a digital pen even better than traditional pen and paper, offer new ways to interact with your documents, and expand your options for creating rich and interactive content. Here is a list of each advancement: 1. Inking is more powerful in the Office apps 2. Office innovations optimized for Surface Studio and Surface Dial 3. Office apps are adding support for new modern content types Get all the details on Office Blogs.New to Office 365 in April
Several Office 365 updates this month can help companies of all sizes accelerate the digital transformation within their organization. Some of the releases include: Outlook Customer Manager is rolling out worldwide Microsoft To-Do transforms the way you manage your tasks Designer is now available in PowerPoint on iPad More Office apps support Office 365 Groups Skype for Windows 10 is generally available Office 365 security and compliance updates Learn more about these releases and other updates on Office Blogs.New value in Office 365 Enterprise K1 for frontline workers
Today, the Office 365 Team is announcing updates to the Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan—designed to enable your frontline workers to do their best work with tools for schedule and task management, communications and community, training and onboarding, and identity and access management. Frontline workers are the heartbeat of many of the world’s largest industries, such as manufacturing, retail, healthcare and hospitality. They’re the people behind the counter, on the phone with customers, operating the production line, building products, and running the day-to-day operations. They are often the face of an organization to its customers. And as more companies invest in digital transformation, there’s a growing recognition of the importance of empowering frontline workers with modern productivity tools. The Office 365 Enterprise K1 plan has been expanded to include the following additional products: Microsoft StaffHub OneDrive for Business with 2 GB of cloud storage Skype for Business presence and instant messaging Microsoft Teams Office 365 Video Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow Learn more on Office Blogs.Announcement: OneNote August roundup
The team has been busy this summer working on new features and feature enhancements to make your work, home and school lives easier. Let’s dive right in this month to share updates to inking, OneNote Class and Staff Notebooks, OneNote Web Clipper and more: Inking: Ink math assistant, Ink replay, Pencil OneNote Web Clipper Learning Tools for OneNote supports more languages and themes and is now generally available OneNote Class Notebook updates and general availability for the add-in Use shared iPads more effectively in the class room Insert PDFs and Word documents in OneNote Online Read detailed descriptions of each feature on Office Blogs.OneNote October roundup
This month, the OneNote team focused on updating the Android app to launch new features and bring back some fan favorites. They also introduced new ways to embed content types and improving usability on shared devices. Here's a broad overview: 1. New to the OneNote for Android app 2. Available again in the Android app 3. Coming soon to OneNote for Android app 4. Embed content into OneNote 5. Use shared Windows devices more effectively in the classroom Get all the details on Office Blogs!Visualize work in powerful new ways
The Visio Team is constantly pursuing the latest innovations to help your team create powerful diagrams. That pursuit continues with several recently released updates for Microsoft Visio Pro for Office 365, including robust database reverse engineering capabilities and new third-party content that meets various industry standards. With these updates, you can visualize your work in exciting and meaningful ways, boosting efficiencies and helping your team make informed decisions with confidence. New updates include: Visualize database structures from source data Download templates for industry-specific diagrams Business processes Software development and engineering IT Education Transform the classroom with Visio Get more details about these updates on Office Blogs.Visio is coming to the web and iOS
Visio has been a trusted tool in diagramming for more than a decade. And we know its visual communication in the form of diagrams will become more powerful when anyone in the company can consume—regardless of their location or device. So, today the Visio Team is excited to announce Visio Viewer for iPad and Visio Online Preview, enabling users to share or access diagrams from nearly anywhere, gain operational insights and explore real-world diagrams easily. Read more about this announcement on Office Blogs.Announcing the release of Threat Intelligence and Advanced Data Governance, plus significant...
Announcing the release of Threat Intelligence and Advanced Data Governance, plus significant updates to Advanced Threat Protection Today, the Office 365 Team is pleased to announce several enhancements that bolster Office 365’s security and compliance capabilities. With the launch of Office 365 Threat Intelligence, the Team is enriching security in Office 365 to help customers stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape. Today, they will also be introducing a new reporting interface to improve the customer experience for Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) and extending the ATP Safe Links feature to Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Office 365 ProPlus desktop clients. Office 365 Advanced Data Governance also launches today, providing customers with robust compliance capabilities. A new policy management interface for Data Loss Protection (DLP), helps Office 365 customers remain compliant and in control of their data. The enhancements include: Enhancing threat protection—a path to proactive cyber-defense with Office 365 Threat Intelligence New Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) reporting interface Extending ATP Safe Links to Office 365 ProPlus desktop clients Ensuring compliance—why Office 365 Advanced Data Governance matters Enhanced Office 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) management experience Read the full announcement on Office Blogs.Unifying Data Loss Prevention in Office 365
All organizations, regardless of size and industry, have data that they consider sensitive. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is an important capability for protecting this information from getting into the wrong hands. We are always looking to enhance the DLP solution in Office 365 to help meet this organizational need. Today, the Office 365 Team is pleased to announce a single management experience for DLP policy creation and reporting across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. In addition, they are introducing enhancements to the DLP data delivered via the Management Activity API. Take a look at the updates and enhancements on Office Blogs.New Office 365 capabilities help you proactively manage security and compliance risk
Missing a key security signal could mean not catching a breach, but the number of security signals is increasing exponentially. It’s becoming impossible to manually prioritize them. That’s why Office 365 applies intelligence to help you proactively manage risk and ward off threats. Today, The Office 365 Team is pleased to introduce several new capabilities in Office 365 that help you manage risk and stay ahead of threats: Office 365 Secure Score—A new security analytics tool that applies a score to Office 365 customers’ current Office 365 security configuration. Office 365 Threat Intelligence Private Preview—Service that leverages billions of data points from the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to provide actionable insights to the global threat landscape and help customers stay ahead of cyber threats. Office 365 Threat Intelligence is now in private preview, with general availability planned for later this quarter. Office 365 Advanced Data Governance Preview—Applies machine learning to help customers find and retain the most important data to them while eliminating redundant, obsolete and trivial data that could cause risk if compromised. Office 365 Advanced Data Governance is now in preview, with general availability planned for later this quarter. Learn more about these new capabilties on Office Blogs.Accessing public folder favorites
Seeing that Outlook desktop and Outlook on the web (or OWA, depending on version) do not support the same types of public folders (or folders added to Favorites) we wanted to talk about what is expected behavior when public folders are used. We have seen some questions around this so – let’s clear it up! Public folder types supported by different clients Outlook supports public folders of following types: Calendar Contact InfoPath Form Journal Mail and Post Note Task OWA supports only the following public folder types: Mail and Post Calendar Contact Adding public folder to favorites using Outlook or OWA Adding public folders to Favorites is slightly different depending on the client. Please see this article which explains how to do it in the respective client. Learn more on the Exchange Blog.Driving Adoption Friday Feature: John White
We are very excited to introduce this week’s Friday Feature— John White! John is CTO and co-founder of UnlimitedViz, a SharePoint and Business Intelligence services provider and ISV. John has been an MVP Office Servers and Services since 2011. Check out his Q&A here.Driving Adoption Friday Feature: John White
We are very excited to introduce this week’s Friday Feature— John White! John is CTO and co-founder of UnlimitedViz, a SharePoint and Business Intelligence services provider and ISV. With over 20 years of IT experience, John has been an MVP Office Servers and Services since 2011. MVP Profile LinkedIn Twitter Tell us a little bit about where you work and your role in the organization: I'm the CTO and co-founder of UnlimitedViz. We originally started out as a SharePoint and Business Intelligence services provider, but have been transitioning over the past few years into an ISV. Our tyGraph line of product now makes up well over half of our business. My role is to provide technical leadership and architecture for both our products and our services. I also get to play a crucial role in marketing, and community outreach. I'm quite lucky, in that I get paid to do what I love to do This month’s Tech Community theme is End-User Adoption. How do you handle the skeptics/’sticks in the mud’? Can you share any best practices for encouraging end-user adoption? There's nothing wrong with skepticism, I think its healthy. True skepticism prevents us from taking things at face value, and the best answer for it are facts. If users can't see value immediately, we need to be able to demonstrate the value of a platform in order to overcome this skepticism, or resistance to change. After all, if I can't see the value in doing things differently, why would I bother? Several of our products have been built to do precisely this, to show the actual value of Office 365 and Yammer networks. How have disruptive technologies like cloud computing, mobility, big data and the IoT impacted your work as a CTO? Is there anything that keeps you up at night? The only thing that keeps me up at night is being able to keep up with the rapid pace of change. Cloud computing allows for very rapid iteration and innovation, and just when you feel that you have something mastered, it changes. In my role I need to understand multiple technologies, their relationship to each other, and the value that they all bring to the table. These changes also sometimes mean re-evaluating fundamental architectural decisions. Thankfully, the problem also brings its own cure to a point. These modern platforms also allow us to innovate rapidly, and our smaller size allows us to respond to changes in the market very quickly. For someone with a short attention span like me, this is just about the perfect environment! You’ve been in IT for over 20 years, which adds up to a lot of changing technology throughout your career. What resources do you use the most to stay up to date? How do you keep up with new technologies and updates? Well, coffee is a wonderful resource! Seriously, this really is a challenge. Being an MVP helps a great deal in that we often are alerted to upcoming changes, so even when we don't know what to watch for, we often know when to look. The community is a great source of information on the personal level. On a day to day basis, I subscribe to updates from many Microsoft blogs, including the SharePoint, Power BI, Flow, PowerApps, and all of the SQL related blogs. I watch both Twitter and Facebook pretty regularly as well. Many in the community are personal friends, and it's incredible how much I actually get from Facebook. The Microsoft Tech Community is less structured and more detailed source for much Microsoft technology, particularly tech from the Office group, and official events round out the Microsoft sources. I also try to catch the Windows Weekly netcast on the TWiT network every week, and subscribe to a number of other tech netcasts including the Microsoft Cloud Show with Andrew Connell and Chris Johnson, and Todd Klindt's SharePoint Admin netcast. How has your approach and perspective on technology changed as you’ve move into more strategic roles? I suppose that the biggest change in focus is from how things work, to how things work together. You also need to be ready to rethink assumptions on a regular basis. This can be a difficult thing to do. Once you've invested a great deal of time and energy into a technology, it's very difficult to just discard it, but that's very often what's necessary. Over the course of my career, I've been a Novell Netware CNE, and a Lotus Notes PCLP, and during both of those phases, I probably held on a little too long ignoring the shifting stands, to my detriment. I've learned from that too. I remain a SharePoint MVP, but when the Business Intelligence workload began moving away from SharePoint, I embraced it and decided to understand the new platforms fully. These days, I likely spend more time looking at a Power BI workspace than I do a team site. If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting their career in IT, what would you tell them? If there's one thing that's served me well over the years, it's the fact that I'm never satisfied knowing what something does - I need to know how it does it. Once you understand how things work, the details often just fall into view. When you learn something new, always try to learn it to the point that you can teach it to others. And above all, always keep an open mind, and listen to others. Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas. Finally, be nice to people on the way up. You'll likely meet them again on the way down. That'sGoodbye!
As some of you may already know, today is my last day on the Community Team. While my time here has been a short eleven months I have truly enjoyed getting to know and interact with all our wonderful community members and MVPs. I’m thankful that I was able to attend fun community events such as Microsoft Ignite, the Tech Summits and the MVP Summit. I truly believe in the power of community (especially this one!) and I know it will continue to grow and evolve into something amazing. Thank you to MichaelHolste, Lana O'Brien, AnnaChu, jeffmedford and DaniMartMS for your support, guidance and encouragement throughout my time here. I’ll be moving on to new adventures after today but I want to thank each and every one of you for making my experience a positive one. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn if you would like to stay in touch! Cheers!Connecting with people to drive adoption
There’s a lot of change in the perception of IT pro roles and what activities IT Pros are involved in. The evolution of your role might require you to work more closely with users than you have in the past. Check out this post where FastTrack’s Sharon Liu discusses how you might engage end users and overcome their resistance to change.Connecting with people to drive adoption
There’s a lot of change in the perception of IT pro roles and what activities IT Pros are involved in. The evolution of your role might require you to work more closely with users than you have in the past. Check out this post where FastTrack’s Sharon Liu discusses how you might engage end users and overcome their resistance to change.Case Study #3: Organic Discovery vs. Forced Adoption
In this week’s adoption case study series, we look at two different ‘extreme’ approaches – one organic approach with limited training that encouraged end-users to discover and one that forced end-users into using the new technology. Check out our post here comparing two anonymous companies’ approaches to driving adoption of new products.
