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www.office.com/setup Blogs: Last year, we released Microsoft Bookings to customers in the U.S. and Canada, introducing an easy way for small businesses to schedule and manage appointments with their customers. Today, we are pleased to announce that we're beginning to roll out the service to Office 365 Business Premium subscribers worldwide. Based on your feedback, we are bringing several new features to Bookings: Add your Office 365 calendar to Bookings-Connect your Office 365 calendar to Bookings, so that the times you are busy will automatically be blocked in your public Booking page. Add buffer time before and after your appointments-Do you need prep time before or after an appointment? Adding buffer time to a service automatically blocks that time in your Booking page too. Bookings apps for your iOS and Android phone-Now you can book an appointment, contact a customer or check a staff member's appointments while away from the office. Customize your Booking page-We added more color customization options, so you can better personalize your Booking page. These new capabilities will start showing up automatically in Bookings in the coming weeks. Let's take a detailed look at what's new. ADD YOUR OFFICE 365 CALENDAR TO BOOKINGS One of the top pieces of feedback we've heard is that you want to be able to add events from your Office 365 calendar to Bookings. So, we added integration between these calendars to help you avoid booking customer meetings during the time you've set aside for personal appointments, staff and partner meetings or other aspects of running your business. To add Office 365 calendars to Bookings, click the Staff tab on the left navigation panel. On the Staff details page, select the Events on Office 365 calendar affect availability checkbox. www.office.com/setup Add Office 365 calendar events to Bookings. Once you activate this option, the system automatically blocks busy times on the Bookings calendar and on the self-ser

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Excel 2016 includes a powerful new set of features based on the Power Query technology, which provides fast, easy data gathering and shaping capabilities and can be accessed through the Get & Transform section on the Data ribbon. Today, we are pleased to announce 10 new data transformation and connectivity features that have been requested by customers. These updates are available as part of an Office 365 subscription. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, find out how to get these latest updates. If you have Excel 2010 or Excel 2013, you can take advantage of these updates by downloading the latest Power Query for Excel add-in. Updates include the following new or improved data connectivity and transformation features: Web Connector-UX support for specifying HTTP Request Headers. OData Connector-support for "Select Related Tables" option. Oracle Connector-improved Navigator preview performance. SAP HANA Connector-enhancements to parameter input UX. Query Dependencies view from Query Editor. Query Editor ribbon support for scalar values. Add custom column based on function invocation. Expand & Aggregate columns provide support for "Load More" values. Convert table column to a list-new transformation. Select as you type in drop-down menus. WEB CONNECTOR-UX SUPPORT FOR SPECIFYING HTTP REQUEST HEADERS With this update, we have added support for specifying HTTP Request Headers within the Web connector dialog. Users can specify header name/value pairs from the Advanced mode in this dialog. november-2016-updates-for-get-transform-in-excel-1 - www.office.com/setup ODATA CONNECTOR-SUPPORT FOR "SELECT RELATED TABLES" OPTION In this update, we have added relationship detection support for OData V4 feeds. When connecting to OData V4 feeds, users will be able to use the Select Related Tables button in the Navigator dialog to help you easily select all the tables needed for your reports. november-2016-updates-for-get-

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Today marks the general availability of Office 2016 for Windows, a suite of desktop applications that together with new mobile and web apps pushes Microsoft's new vision for PC-based productivity. Office 2016 is available immediately to Office 365 subscribers, as well as to individuals who would prefer to buy the software in standalone form. "We see Office 2016 as being just as important as the first release of Office," Microsoft group program manager Shawn Villaron told me in a briefing last week. "In the early days, Office was about bringing really important tools together to empower the individual for personal productivity. That was the way people wanted to work at that time. And for 20 to 30 years, Office fit right in. Today, things are changing. More people collaborate on work as groups and teams, so Office 2016 represents the change from personal productivity to team productivity." And that, really, is Office 2016 in a nutshell. If you're a typical information worker, student, or other person in need of standard productivity tools, Office 2016 of course works fine and represents an obvious and stable evolution from the Office version you're currently using. But the real meat in this release-now and going forward, as Office will of course be updated regularly, like Windows 10-is the designed around this new way of working. Confusing matters somewhat, Office-not Office 2016, but Office generally-is all over the place now. In addition to the classic, full-featured desktop suites on both Windows and Mac, Microsoft has high-quality Office Online web apps, mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows/Windows phones-and Office 365-specific solutions that are often available as web apps but are sometimes just integrated into the desktop applications. This ain't your father's Office anymore. Office everywhere: Microsoft Office is available on virtually any device you care to use. - www.office.com/setup Office eve

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Evernote and OneNote are two of our favorite tools, but both have changed substantially since we last compared these two apps-in some ways, not for the best. Here's where these two stand today. www.office.com/setup LIFEHACKER FACEOFF: ONENOTE VS. EVERNOTE Now that Microsoft OneNote is free for Mac and Windows, the price and cross-platform barriers to…Read more WHAT'S NEW IN EVERNOTE In the last year, Evernote introduced a new pricing plan, redesigned its webapp, and added new features for its Android and iOS apps. THE FREE PLAN LOSES A FEATURE, BUT NOW THERE'S A MORE AFFORDABLE PAID PLAN Let's talk price first with Evernote, since it's the biggest change in the last year. The free plan no longer lets you email notes to Evernote, something most users enjoyed and used often prior to that change. Although you can get around this limitation with an IFTTT recipe, you won't get the full flexibility of Evernote's email-to-notes feature, such as specifying your destination notebook in the email subject line. So that's a bummer. On the positive side, however, Evernote introduced a new, more affordable paid plan called Evernote Plus. For $25 a year, you get offline notebooks for Evernote's mobile apps and the ability to lock the app on your phone with a PIN. Both of these used to require Evernote's Premium plan, which used to cost $45 a year. Finally, Evernote's Premium plan now costs $50 a year. But in return for those five extra bucks, you get larger upload limits: 10GB a month, instead of the previous 4GB data cap. With Evernote Premium, you can search attachments, scan business cards, view previous note versions, annotate PDFs, and use the new note presentation mode. EVERNOTE'S USER INTERFACE KEEPS EVOLVING www.office.com/setup Last year, Evernote took its redesigned, minimalist web client out of beta. Though slicker and easier on the eyes, the makeover also made the webapp less functional. You can't order

Last week, we welcomed Brian Solis, Altimeter principal analyst, thought leader and book author, to Yammer HQ to give a fireside chat, followed by signing of his new book: "What's The Future of Business?" I was thrilled to interview Brian, and we covered a variety of really meaty subjects - just check out the video below! The theme of the evening was transformation - transformation that is happening in our lives as individuals, how we relate to each other through technology and what we as businesses must do to stay relevant to the connected customer. Even the book itself is transformation of the book publishing convention. Unlike a regular, information-dense business book, "What's the Future of Business" attempts to bring together the best of both worlds: hard-hitting facts and practical frameworks, as well as a visual experience. The experience of the book is just as important as the content therein. What is the future of business? The future of business is experience, according to Solis. We as connected consumers make decisions outside of the sales funnel that companies have organized themselves around. We reference experiences of consumers who came before us, and contribute our own experiences to this dynamic tapestry. When consumers share, they are reacting to an experience, and the future of any business depends on its ability to provide experiences that are worth sharing. In his talk, Brian talked about the 4 moments of truth that add up to shareable experiences. At every stage of the customer journey, it is our job as businesses to design an experience to trigger the sharing of a moment. The Zero Moment of Truth comes when the consumer is starting to explore choices and is just becoming aware of needs and possible solutions. 1st Moment of Truth happens when the consumer is ready to buy. Consumer packaged goods companies have perfected providing the right experience at this point. 2nd Moment of Truth happens after the consumer purchases,

Part of the thrill of working for the Office Division is the opportunity to tackle thorny business issues on behalf of our customers while providing them with a road map for the future. That may be why an interesting article caught my attention this week. In it, the author examined some of the investments Microsoft is making in the unified communications space. While I didn't agree with all of the conclusions it contained, the article certainly underscored the interest in communications and collaboration and how to make people more productive. Communicating and collaborating with others is really at the heart of what we do every day. Whether at work or at home, people have the need to make meaningful connections with one another. Compounding that need are the realities of the world we live in where instant access to information is expected, friends and coworkers are scattered across geographies and many adults are juggling multiple mobile devices. At Microsoft, we believe technology isn't the problem to these complexities, it's the answer. We're committed to providing capabilities that help people make sense of it all and to do so in a way that is intuitive, barrier free and agnostic to the devices on which we rely. We're incredibly proud of the fact that our long term-term vision for communications and collaboration not only marries the best of the cloud and the desktop, it's a holistic approach that spans "from the living room to the boardroom" placing people at the center of everything we do. Our communication and collaboration vision comes to life utilizing client and cloud assets, including Lync, Skype, Yammer, Outlook and SharePoint. These tools are enabling enterprise social capabilities, HD video conferencing and document collaboration as part of a highly secured, reliable and extensible platform. At the risk of looking geeky, I have to admit that I have a soft spot for Lync and it's comforting to know I'm not alone. More than 90% of

Good customer support complements a great product or service and enhances the overall experience. Emails have been one of the most popular support mechanisms and have long been in the scene. But lately, with the paucity of time, customers have started demanding instant resolution to their queries. They do not have the patience to wait for a day to receive a response to their query. So what do we do? One probable solution that comes to my mind is Chat. And why not, when there are reasons that make it better than email. Let's have a look at some of them.

A since deceased, highly-regarded fellow faculty member, Anthony (Tony) Athos, occasionally sat on a bench on a nice day at the Harvard Business School, apparently staring off into space. When asked what he was doing, ever the iconoclast, he would say, "Nothing." His colleagues, trained to admire and teach action, would walk away shaking their heads and asking each other, "Is he alright?" It is perhaps no coincidence that Tony often came up with some of the most profound insights at faculty meetings and informal gatherings. This story captures much of the sense of the responses to this month's question about why managers don't think deeply. The list of causes was much longer than the list of proposed responses. But in the process, some other questions were posed. Ben Kirk kicked off the list of reasons for the phenomenon when he commented, "… what rises to the top levels are very productive and very diligent individuals who tend not to … reflect and are extremely efficient at deploying other people's ideas," implying that this type of leader is not likely to understand, encourage, or recognize deep thinking in others. Adnan Younis added the possibility that "… managers are not trained for it." Dianne Jacobs cited the possibility that persisting assumptions borne out of success serve as "roadblocks to act on needed change" (proposed by those who engage in deep thinking?). Ulysses U. Pardey, whose comment triggered my recollection of Tony Athos, wrote that "Time-for-thinking is a special moment which can be resource consuming and an unsafe activity …" (Fortunately, Athos held a tenured position in an academic organization.) A number of comments alluded to the triumph of bureaucracies and large organizations over deep thinking. As Lorre Zuppan said, "I think Jeff Immelt's efforts to protect deep thinking reflect a nice sentiment but … If his team could carry the ball, would he need to announce that he's protecting it?" Tom Henkel was more succinct: "Ther

As a RVP, I got the opportunity to talk to some of the customers and help them in the Expert Hour sessions. Some of the customers were totally new to eLearning and Raptivity whereas some were themselves Raptivity Experts. Before the call, customers had shared their thoughts and issues with us through a pre-call survey. Many customers wanted to know how Raptivity interactivities could be used differently whereas few had queries on which interactions could be used for their specific content and so on. These points were taken up during the one hour sessions with them. To name some of them, once I showed how a very simple interaction model 'Flash Card' can be used differently to show a profit chart. I also took some customers through the Tin Can tracking mechanism of Raptivity. Various new features like media tool box, HTML5 publishing, global settings, etc were also show cased during the calls.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft today detailed the new features and improvements that it delivered to Office 365 users this month. Key among them are new Excel co-authoring capabilities, Microsoft Teams, and new OneNote inking and accessibility updates. "Office 365 provides the broadest and deepest toolkit for collaboration between individuals, teams and entire organizations," Microsoft corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer explains. Here's what's new in March. CO-AUTHORING IN EXCEL 2016 FOR WINDOWS Following similar functionality in Word and PowerPoint, Microsoft has enabled co-authoring capabilities in Excel for the Windows desktop (Excel 2016). (This feature is also available in Excel Online and Excel Mobile on Android, iOS, and Windows 10; Excel for Mac support is coming soon.) "This allows you to know who else is working with you in a spreadsheet, see where they're working and view changes automatically within seconds," Mr. Koenigsbauer says. Co-authoring in Excel 2016 for Windows is rolling out for Office 365 subscribers in Office Insider Fast, Microsoft says. Co-authoring in Excel for iOS is currently available for Office Insider. The feature is generally available in Excel Mobile for Android and Windows, and in Excel Online. AUTOSAVE Microsoft is working to expand the availability of AutoSave beyond mobile versions of Office: Office 365 subscribers in Office Insider Fast now have access to AutoSave in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows desktop, for files stored in SharePoint Online, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business. "With AutoSave, you can stop worrying about hitting the Save button, whether you're working alone or with others," Mr. Koenigsbauer explains. MICROSOFT TEAMS Microsoft delivered its long-awaited Slack alternative, called Microsoft Teams, earlier this month to all Office 365 commercial customers. And last week, it shipped Microsoft Teams to all Office 365 Education subscribers as well. "We are thri

www.office.com/setup Blogs: The new admin center reached general availability one month ago. This was a big milestone in our mission to provide you with a first-class admin experience, with tools that enable you to efficiently manage all aspects of the service. We continue to evolve the admin center. This month, we focused on providing you with additional usage insights, including new usage reports, the preview of the Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI and more role-based permissions through a new Power BI admin role. Here's a summary of the October updates: NEW USAGE REPORTS STARTING TO ROLL OUT TODAY In March, we launched the new reporting dashboard in the Office 365 admin center that makes it easier for you to efficiently monitor your service, identify issues, plan training and report back on the investment to your management. Today, we are happy to announce four new usage reports for active users, Email clients, Skype for Business clients and Office 365 Groups, that provide you with additional insights about how users in your organization are using and adopting Office 365. Here's a look at each report: Active Users report-Lets you see which of your users actively use one or more of the different Office 365 services. This report is especially helpful for admins to identify users for whom they might want to plan some additional training and communication. Often, after being assigned an Office 365 license, users need a helping hand to get started with the different services. They might not know how to activate the product or how the product can help them to be more productive. The image below shows all users that are licensed for one or more products and the last date they used any of those products. By clicking the Column icon, admins can modify the table to see which license has been assigned to a user, as well as when the license was assigned to the user. admin-center-october-1 - www.office.com/setup Blogs Skype for Business clients used r

May's Customer of the Month is Melanie Hohertz, Online Communications Lead, Cargill. I've been supporting Yammer as a work platform for Cargill for almost a year. We're early in our adoption, but it's been an amazing experience. I am learning, daily, how Yammer can change the way people and teams work and add value in a company that is more than 140,000 strong and spread throughout 65 countries. Our network will pass 10,000 members soon and already, you can't stump us on anything. From food to agriculture to financial and industrial products and services, Yammer is helping Cargill use what Cargill knows, and that's a lot. Yammer can connect people across silos based on organization, geography and hierarchy. I've seen customer reps talking directly to product management, and senior leaders listening to recently-hired employees. We have new ways to realize the power of our communities of practice to speed up ideation and action. Sure, we still have a long road ahead before Yammer is as ubiquitous and instinctive as e-mail, but we throw a heck of a YamJam, and the signal-to-noise ratio in our network is beautiful.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft Office www.office.com/setup Blogs: Windows 10 has grabbed the attention of social media and customers alike more so because it is a crucial operating system for Microsoft after the debacle of Windows 8 and a not so great reception for Windows 8.1. But, Microsoft has another major product on their cards now, Office, which enhances the Windows productivity of five major products into a system of applications. With Office 2016, Microsoft plans to build from scratch, a mobile and cloud first approach which is customer centric and doesn't only focus on web compared to Office 365 and 2013. Office 2016 has recently been launched on September 22, 2015. www.office.com/setup The Cost factor The first and the most important thing we look at during major software products and updates is the price tag that comes along with it as there are so multiple updates for major software and it is not feasible to go through each and every revision. The all new Office 2016 suite is free for customers on mobile and tablets (conditions apply) and pretty cheap at $145 for "Office Home & Student 2016" and the RRP version of the same is priced at $165, along with subscription version of the suite (Office 365 Personal) at about $70 per year. Built for collaboration Office suite has changed how businesses operate and more focus is laid on connectivity and collaboration of projects. So, the latest offering from Microsoft, Office 2016 is emphasized on collaborations among spread out team members who may never work in the same office environment, but easily enhance productivity by accomplishing a major task that took a week to get it done. Touch centric user interface If you have used the Office for Windows 10, it is quite evident that Microsoft has given a universal app style for the apps and a touch friendly UI which is more familiar to the iPad owners. For instance, in Word, Microsoft lays focus on providing touch friendly controls for ease of

www.office.com/setup Blogs: 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, we're 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. KNOW YOUR OFFICE 365 SECURE SCORE Do you know how you'd be rated if someone were to evaluate your security configuration? To give you better visibility into your Office 365 security configuration and the security features available to you, we're pleased to introduce Secure Score-a new security analytics tool. Secure Score helps you understand your current Office 365 security configuration and shows you how implementing additional controls can further enhance your security and reduce risk.* Here's how it works: Secure Score Summary-Displays your Secure Score and provides access to view your Score Analyzer. Your Secure Score, the numerator, is the sum of the points associated wi

April's Customer of the Month is Robert Aichele, Senior Manager, Store Communications at Jamba Juice. I've been at Jamba since 2009 managing internal communication, primarily store and field communication, with a hand in some broader projects connecting our strategic vision with the managers in the field. Our Yammer network debuted in 2011, catching on with a small group and then expanding quickly to include our entire Support Center. It was so popular we extended it to our company-owned store managers later that year, and it plateaued happily there for several months as an interesting tool to share ideas and problem solve operational issues when we needed to hear diverse perspectives quickly.

When we launched the preview of Outlook.com, our goal was to build the best email service in the world, capable of scaling to over a billion active customers. When Outlook.com came out of preview, it was already the fastest growing email service thanks to your support. The last two months have seen the release of a new, modern Outlook.com calendar, a refreshed Outlook.com app for Android devices, two-factor authentication for your account, new international domains for people around the world, and the release of a preview of Skype calling in Outlook.com. Today, we're excited to announce that we've completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com. Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400 million active Outlook.com accounts, including 125 million that are accessing email, calendar and contacts on a mobile device using Exchange ActiveSync. We're also pleased to announce that we're adding two new features to Outlook.com: SMTP send, so it's easier to send mail from different email addresses, and deeper integration with SkyDrive.