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darrellaas
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Joined Jun 23, 2016
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Learn Viva Amplify: 8 lesson walk through
Hey communicators. With the release of Viva Amplify I recorded a 1 hour walk through to help us all get started. Or help organisations considering using Amplify to see what it's like. Whether it's your full-time role or one of the functions of your position, Amplify provides a way for us to create, coordinate, publish and report on our communications across multiple channels. As first release, it's quite functional. It makes smart use of a team for your campaign, the Amplify app for creating and coauthoring publications. The distribution channels help us reach our audiences where they are. We can only publish to the places we have access to. Reporting gives us views and some information about how people have responded to, reacted to, or promoted the publication. If you have access to Amplify, what do you think of it? Share your first impressions. If you are interested in seeing the walk-through, you'll find a playlist with 8 lessons to step through in your own timing.
Set up Amplify and check out the Adoption resources.
Be sure to review this guide for setting up Amplify in your organisation. You need to have either a Viva Communications and Communities license, or a Viva Suite license. Add people to the admin roles - SharePoint Admin, Groups Admin. Manage who can create campaigns in Amplify - Default is ‘Everyone in your organisation’. But you can limit it to selected people and members of security groups you define. The Amplify app will appear in the Microsoft 365 app launcher once it has fully rolled out to your organisation. Review the user guid for creating and managing campaigns at support.microsoft.com. More Viva Amplify adoption resources at https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/amplify/Re: Comms videos - Process. Tools. Skills. Let’s talk.
Thank you for your support BillKirst. I learn so much from sharing my learning-journey with the community. Video has been a big part of that. I like what you shared about using different tools to record and edit videos. I agree that people value authenticity more so than flashy production techniques. Apps like Clipchamp, Canva and Adobe Express are so helpful, making simple editing easier to access. For quick video editing on mobile, my go-to app is Videoleap. I tried the Clipchamp web app via Microsoft 365 just last week. It works quite well for quick simple videos. Looking closer, I was surprised to see the web app edits the video file locally on our computer, then uploads it. Clever. I see the new Stream working on video recording and screen recording too. I cant help thinking that there should be a merge between Stream web recording and Clipchamp. But it wouldn’t be the first time that two or more Microsoft product groups work on similar features/products. To help people leaders with video editing, it would be good to see video sharing and coauthoring scenarios develop. A people leader could record a video from mobile then use Clipchamp to start editing. They ask for some help from a team member and share the video (the file could be stored in their OneDrive.) Then the team member might be able to either leave comments or help coauthor the video, syncing changes in the video project back to the people leader’s OneDrive. It’s interesting to see developments in this space and I do hope organisations encourage sharing of video.Re: When, if ever, should we use the S word?
I hear you thompsonsimon. Yammer suffered the same stigma, even though it has improved and is now Viva Engage. I think the typical person using M365 has mixed awareness of apps, tools and the names of products. Microsoft would love everyone to recognise an app and the name for it. But I think in reality, typical people will use the tools available and not think too much about the name. They know they use Teams for conversations and meetings. They have spent a good number of hours in Outlook. I think an intranet is different. As some of said on this thread, it’s based on SharePoint, but we also want our intranets to have their own identity. The counter point is that intranets in Microsoft 365 appear to be dissolving into other products. We can access pieces of our intranet within Teams via Viva Connections. Our Teams may use SharePoint pages in channel tabs to share information. Communication sites are popping up everywhere and when co-ordinated well, they are connected to the global navigation so people can find them. We can’t avoid the ‘S’ word. But I would still lead with giving the intranet its own name, something the organisation can form a sense of ownership, and say it’s ’powered by SharePoint’.Comms videos - Process. Tools. Skills. Let’s talk.
Video is a powerful communication medium. Now that creating and editing and publishing videos can all be done from our phones, it opens up the possibilities for authentic, engaging content in our orgs. I have seen some fantastic examples shared on Viva Engage. We have TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to thank for this. How are you approaching video in your organisations? Are you encouraging your people leaders to whip out their phone and record a quick thought in-situ? Some comms videos require a higher production standard, equipment, editing tools, scripts, lighting… How are you creating comms videos in your organisation? Do you have some go-to formats that have been effective at getting your message across? How do you plan your people-leader videos? How are you finding the new Stream as a video publishing platform, in combo with SharePoint? Or are you using a different combo of tools? A survey was shared earlier in this community that asked the same questions. But I thought it would be interesting to have a discussion about it too. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/corporate-communications/do-you-create-videos-or-screen-recordings-for-work/m-p/3933509/highlight/true#M76Interview: Yammer connected Office 365 Groups
I managed to snag espnguyen and Angus Florance to talk about Yammer connected Office 365 Groups rolling out this week. Loryan Strant and a live audience helped us put some pertinent questions to Steve and Angus. After 18 months of plumbing and "non-sexy" updates, it looks like Yammer is ready to start ramping up on feature releases. I expect many will be in-line with the Office 365 Groups fabric, bringing parity to teams that choose the Yammer experience for their conversations. We had some curly questions around compliance and the different waves of updates for Yammer connected Office 365 Groups. It's 30min interview via Soundcloud or YouTube. RE:Office 365 - Interview: Yammer connected Office 365 GroupsRe: Disable free access to public teams
Hi MatthiasRepy. Do you now want the team to be Private and control who is a member? Change the team to Private. Post a message to all members telling them you are restricting access and that members will be removed from the team. Then remove the members you longer want to access the team. The challenging part is clearly explaining why you are restricting access and removing members, without causing confusion.Re: MS Teams Recording
Hi Sumeet_Mukherjee. Do you want a meeting organiser to choose if a meeting is automatically recorded? Meeting organisers can use a setting in the “Meeting options” for each meeting. The “Record automatically” option sets the recording to start when the first attendees joins. See this page for reference. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-participant-settings-for-a-teams-meeting-53261366-dbd5-45f9-aae9-a70e6354f88eRe: Microsoft to Introduce Auto-Expiration for Teams Meeting Recordings
TonyRedmond, Deleted, - You're right Tony. Moving a recording will also move the auto-expire setting. But copying a file to a different location will remove auto-expire, as will downloading and uploading the recording. There will also be user-level settings that allow a recording owner or meeting organiser to change the expiry for a specific recording. You will be able to choose from 14, 30 or 60 days, set a specific expiry date or set it to not expire at all. Reference: A messy FAQ - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cloud-recording#frequently-asked-questionsRe: Microsoft Teams inconsistencies with channel notification settings
Hi @Glenn. I agree it's confusing and I'm interested in seeing an official answer to these quesitons too. I too think that 'Followed channels' in Teams Settings > Notifications, is an orphaned setting. I've seen Microsoft Support docs that previously pointed to the "Follow a Channel" topic, redirect to setting Channel notifications at the channel level. So it appears you can't even find out from support docs, what the setting 'Followed channels' actually does.Feedback and requests for Learning Pathways content
I see that we can give feedback on Learning Pathways via the Github page. But it doesn't feel like the right place to discuss requests for content. Much of the Learning Pathways content is from support.office.com. I've noticed a pattern in the URL which can be used to add further content from support.office.com, when the pages support it. For example: "Get to know Outlook on the Web" is an asset in Office for the web training > Outlook on the web. It's URL is: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/get-to-know-outlook-on-the-web-3f1a229b-0d60-438f-b515-dd7a28026bc1 I can manipulate the URL to make it display as an embedded asset in Learning Pathways by exchanging /article for /client, and adding the operand ?embed=true at the end of the URL. https://support.office.com/en-us/client/3f1a229b-0d60-438f-b515-dd7a28026bc1?embed=true But there are a limited number of support.office.com pages that support this manipulation, namely pages that include /article. [Edit] It actually looks like the team at support.office.com are producing the new content without the intention to make it embeddable. I say this because the URLs are different. Take a look at the URLs in Microsoft Teams / Chat in Microsoft Teams / Send and read. Pages such as "Send a file, picture, or link in Teams" use /office and not /article. The embed operand doesn't work, nor does it help by adding /client into the URL. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/send-a-file-picture-or-link-in-teams-0e930dcd-46fd-42c3-8d7d-15af4f9bcfca I hope this isn't a departure from making articles embeddable. My requests Please make all pages at support.office.com embeddable so we can add them to Learning Pathways as and when needed. You have a great page that lists videos for using Outlook on the Web - "Learn more about Outlook on the web" https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/learn-more-about-outlook-on-the-web-adbacbab-fe59-4259-a550-6cb7f85f19ec I'd like to add it as an additional asset to the existing playlist "Office for the web: Outlook for the web". But "Learn more about Outlook on the web" doesn't support embedding. Please create a forum in this community for discussing Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways. Github is fine for developers and the /MicrosoftDocs/OfficeDocs-CustomLearning node is the right place for feedback about functionality and issues related to the app. But it's not really the place for discussing content or how Learning Pathways is used.Re: How to put together a Work From Home environment using Microsoft 365 — A RE365 Hackathon
We just finished our WFH virtual hackathon and covered so much in two hours with all the solutions created and discussed. Thank you to: Intranet, Yammer, Adoption — Sarah Haase, Rebecca Jackson, Daniel Glenn. Power Platform — Tomasz Poszytek, Haniel Croitoru, Dawid Ziolkowski. Security and Compliance — Alex Fields, Alistair Pugin. Teams — Ian Moran, Phil WorrellRe: From WFH WTF? to WFH FTW!
You raise a really good point. If you have to work from home but you’re not set up to do so, it’s going to be a less comfortable experience. I know some organisations that didn’t want to spend money on good headsets for making calls. That’s going to be difficult For people and conversations when audio is hard to hear For both speaker and listener. I really like how you tested out some of the advice given by full-time work from home people. It may not work for everyone. But do take a tip and make it your own. Adjust it to whatever fits your situation.Re: Food for WFH - how to think, prepare and make it
Simon Binder, I find I eat left-overs from last nights dinner more often when working from home. I definitely save money and see less waste. My kitchen is conveniently a few steps away and I can prepare whatever I need. Whereas at work, the kitchen is limited. Cool topic. Interested to read what others have to share.Maintaining engagement with your team and your organisation
I think one of our greatest challenges while working from home is keeping engaged with your team and your organisation. It's easy to get so focused on a piece of work that hours go by and you haven't checked in with your team. We underestimate the value of the conversation around us, or being able to turn to the side and bounce an idea off a team member. What do you do to keep in touch with team members, outside of stand-up calls and scheduled meetings? When working remotely, you need to make more of an effort to engage team members and your organisation. It becomes a habit you need to develop, to post what you're working on, to ask a question or two in a Team or on Yammer. Share a short news post in your team sites and tell a story with pictures, video and a few references. Schedule blocks of focus time, just like you do in your office. (you do that right?) Get on a 'meet now' call occasionally. If you're team uses Teams, consider creating a channel for check-ins and impromptu calls for engagement. When a team member wants to check in or have some 'human real-time contact', they can start or join one of these calls in the channel. Got any other ideas? Reply to this thread or start a new conversation in this 'Enabling Remote Work' community. I'm certain I'm going to learn something new that will help me an my org work more effectivly from home.
