Group items tagged

This episode marks the first in a three part series, as hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh go deeper on automating the new Office for your organization. Watch as they reveal the second XStream install of the season, as host and pilot Yoni attempts an Office 365 ProPlus install, with no Internet access, while performing outrageously high-G aerobatics.

Small businesses have enough to focus on without having to spend time and energy worrying about email, data storage or backup servers. In fact, most small businesses don't know or understand what a server is. The good news is that in today's technology environment, they don't need to. This is because more small businesses are rapidly moving from outdated technology solutions to Web-based solutions to power their company, also known as "moving to the cloud." By moving to cloud solutions like Office 365, small businesses find they can concentrate their resources on growing their business rather than trying to solve technical issues. Large enterprises typically have entire divisions dedicated to supporting and keeping their IT infrastructure up and running. Even though small businesses don't have this luxury, they can still punch above their weight by choosing the enterprise-grade IT services in Office 365 to help solve their most top-of-mind business challenges.

When FHI 360 wanted to move to cloud-based business productivity services, the organization decided to implement a Microsoft cloud-based solution. We recently spoke to Douglas Wilkins, Director of IT Infrastructure at FHI 360, to learn how the company is benefiting: FHI360 logoQ: Please tell us about FHI 360. Douglas Wilkins: FHI 360 is a nonprofit human development organization dedicated to improving lives in lasting ways by advancing integrated, locally driven solutions. Our staff includes experts in health, education, nutrition, environment, economic development, civil society, gender equality, youth, research, technology, communication, and social marketing-creating a unique mix of capabilities to address today's interrelated development challenges. FHI 360 serves more than 60 countries and all US states and territories. Q: Why did you want to move to cloud-based services for messaging and collaboration? Wilkins: We had a diverse IT infrastructure. Employees in the US had different IT toolsets and Internet access than staff in countries like Mozambique. Subscribing employees to a single, cloud-based solution was the most expedient way to ensure that everyone had the same IT tools, to work efficiently regardless of location. Migrating our communication and collaboration technologies to the cloud reduced much of the time required by our IT staff to manage divergent IT infrastructures and connectivity options found around the world. Q: What criteria did you use to select Microsoft as your vendor for cloud-based business productivity services? Wilkins: We wanted a vendor that demonstrated a real interest in our mission and goals, and that offered online business productivity tools tailored for the enterprise space. The capabilities of the Microsoft Services Consulting team, and the work of Intellinet, the partner Microsoft introduced us to, provided us with that. We migrated our 4,300 staff members around the world from diverse platforms to a Microsoft Offi

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.

Guest blogger Emily Warn is co-owner of Two Pens, which provides blogging services and teaches business how to write content that grows a social media following. My writer friends think I'm a geek. You can do what?! I can create a spreadsheet with book sales numbers that can be sorted by name and number. I know that is only the first rung of Excel Geek-dom, and unlike my compatriots, I aspire to climb into the ranks of those who know how to create snazzy charts and perform other formatting feats. Perhaps I'll be able to brand myself as a writer who plays with numbers.

Crafting the right content takes time and attention. To help you minimize the distractions, we created a Read Mode layout in Word. Read Mode is an option in the View menu that hides toolbars and menus to leave more room for the pages themselves.

In the finale of our three part deep dive on customizing and deploying the new Office, our intrepid hosts demonstrate Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run integration with your existing management and deployment tools while exploring pre-installation via Windows image. Watch too as our fearless host Jeremy gets behind the wheel to test if Windows Intune can install Office as fast as a direct install from Office 365 from his car, in the time it takes him to go over Seattle's famous 520 floating bridge.

With Google Apps and Office 365 revolutionizing the way people work, you may feel that Microsoft Office is quickly becoming a dated product that will soon be packed away to the back of the closet. But with the 2016 version set to launch in autumn of this year, Microsoft is looking to change your mind. Now they're adapting their classic Office package for today's modern workforce. Here are four of the new features that are reinventing the way you look at your Office applications. CLOUD FOCUS FOR OUTLOOK ATTACHMENTS Microsoft knows that sharing attachments amongst co-workers and teams can be a hassle. With many collaborators still sharing documents and files the old fashioned way - attaching it to an email and then sending to others - it's easy for users to get confused and send an incorrect or outdated version. To solve this problem, Microsoft is gently nudging us to use the cloud. Now when you add an attachment to an email, you're now asked if you'd also like to share a link to a file on your OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint account. SHOWCASING EASY WAYS TO USE OFFICE BETTER If you're like most people, you probably aren't using Office to its full potential. And who can blame you? Between Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more, there are literally hundreds of features and tools you can use - if only you had the time to discover them all. To help you get the most out of Office, Microsoft has now added a Tell Me box in the top center of your program title bar. This tool gives you an easy way to get questions answered. For example, if you want to project your desktop screen to a second monitor or create a graph in Excel, simply type your question into the Tell Me box and Microsoft will find the answers that most closely fit your search criteria. SWAY Look out PowerPoint, here comes Sway - the new, hipper Office application that makes creating fluid, stylish presentations easy. With Sway, you can now gather content from various source

As governments strive to become more responsive and transparent, it's important for them to make public information easily accessible to citizens. At the same time, it's critical that they protect confidential data. A key reason why governments choose Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft's leadership in the industry when it comes to privacy, security, and compliance practices. In short, governments know they can trust Microsoft to help protect their data. So how does Microsoft demonstrate leadership and why exactly do governments trust Office 365 to help protect their data? Here are four reasons: We respect your privacy. Google is under criticism for its privacy practices. Office 365 does not build advertising products out of customer data, unlike other companies. Nor do we scan your email or documents for building analytics, data mining, or advertising, or to improve the service. What's more, you own your data. Office 365 customer data belongs to the customer. Customers can remove their data whenever they choose. Office 365 is independently verified. Office 365 is compliant with many world-class industry standards, and it is verified by third parties. For example, Office 365 is the first major business productivity public cloud service to have implemented the rigorous set of physical, logical, process, and management controls defined by ISO 27001, one of the best security benchmarks available in the world. In addition, Office 365 is the first major business productivity public cloud service provider to sign the standard contractual clauses created by the European Union ("EU Model Clauses") with all customers. Office 365 also implements security processes that adhere to the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) required by U.S. federal agencies and to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). With Office 365, you know where your data is located. Office 365 customers know where major Office 365 datacenters are located

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,

As announced earlier today, over the next few days we are releasing an update to Microsoft account. For people who use Outlook.com, this includes a number of new features such as two-step verification, the ability to sign in with an alias and new international domains for your email address. OPTIONAL TWO-STEP VERIFICATION HELPS KEEP YOU MORE SECURE You can now choose to enable two-step verification for your entire account. Two-step verification is when we ask you for two pieces of information when you sign in to your account-your password plus a code sent to a phone or email that you gave us as security info. Many of you have asked for this and we're delighted to be able to offer this capability. Two-step verification is a great way to add extra protection to your account. Once you've enabled two-step verification, even if a criminal gets your password (for example, through malware on a friend's machine that you used, or if you use the same password for another service that gets breached) they can't access your account. You can read more about two-step verification here, or just start setting it up at https://account.live.com/proofs/Manage -it only takes a few minutes. SIGN IN WITH ANY ALIAS ON YOUR ACCOUNT We've heard from a lot of you that you love using Outlook.com but you wish you had more flexibility signing in. Many of you have added an email alias to your account, but you can't use the alias to sign in to your account. Previously the only option was to permanently rename your account, which is a hassle and requires you to reset certain devices. With this release, you can now sign in with any alias that has been added to your account. We've also simplified the experience of adding and managing aliases, with better advice on when you should add an alias vs. renaming your primary alias.

Based in Chicago, Illinois, United is one of the largest airlines in the world. To improve enterprise content management (ECM), United wanted to build communities around the products and services it delivers to customers. The airline initially deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and subsequently migrated to SharePoint Server 2010, which United developed into an enterprise platform for ECM and e-discovery, co-locating approximately 1 terabyte of content for the enterprise. In 2012, the airline deployed SharePoint Server 2013 for a variety of projects-including a service catalog that 87,000 employees rely on to search for and order products from the IT department. By using SharePoint Server 2013, United has also simplified content management-the amount of time required to enter a new item into the catalog has plummeted from two months to a few hours.

Microsoft Corp. announced today that the power and automation technology company ABB will deploy Microsoft Office 365 and Yammer to its employees worldwide. With about 145,000 employees in 100 countries, ABB is transitioning from multiple IT collaboration and messaging solutions to Office 365 to provide a single solution for productivity, communication, collaboration and enterprise social in the cloud. "Office 365 and Yammer will enable us to transform communication and collaboration among our employees, surfacing the best and most innovative ideas across the organization," said Andy Tidd, CIO at ABB Group. For more details around this announcement, please visit the Customer Spotlight newsroom.

In order to stay competitive in today's world, teams need to connect and share with each other more than ever before. On March 28th, we had the pleasure of hosting Rob Koplowitz from Forrester Research and Walton Smith from Booz Allen Hamilton in a live webinar where they discussed why organizations are turning to enterprise social and how they are using it to help their teams work more openly and efficiently. Rob discussed how communication is changing, and how we're accessing and interacting with information in new ways-incredibly, 66% of information workers in North America and Europe already work remotely.* The shift to cloud-based software and platforms is definitely contributing to some of these changes. The old way of building software involved engineers, months of coming up with specs, running Beta programs, and debugging. The time from idea to ship could take years. So the introduction of the cloud-and social-to the Enterprise is enabling companies to innovate and move to market faster than ever before. The cloud provides anytime, anywhere access which is essential to our increasingly mobile work environments; today employees can quickly and easily access a range of business systems, information and expertise from anywhere in the world. Our shift to cloud-based platforms and the introduction of working openly with social are changing the way teams collaborate. Take, for example, Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading provider of management and technology consulting services. The company has over 26,000 employees worldwide, with over 71% of their employees working on-site with customers, which often limits their access to company resources.** But in order to provide the best service to their clients, consultants need to be able to quickly and easily access information and expertise. Booz Allen recently integrated Yammer as a social layer across business tools because the cloud-based platform enables consultants world-wide to collaborate virtually. When o

Meeting notes, vacation plans, grocery lists, great quotes, notes to self-let me count the ways to use OneNote. Consolidate all of your crucial information chunks and snippets in one place, then link with OneDrive to share this virtual notebook with yourself (roaming), with other people (collaboration), and with other devices (OneNote ecosystem). Can't view this video? It's also on Microsoft Showcase. Need a peek? Here's a 30-second trailer. Note SkyDrive is now OneDrive, and SkyDrive Pro is now OneDrive for Business. Read more about this change at From SkyDrive to OneDrive. What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar Using OneNote for your next household project Ways to share OneNote meeting notes Share with OneNote, even if you don't have it OneNote for Android, iPhone, iPad. References for this webinar Share your notebook (video) Share notes with other people (how-to) Work together on a shared notebook (OneNote 2010 training course) Share notes in a meeting (how-to) Plan a trip with others (video) OneNote keyboard shortcuts (2010) and (2013) OneNote mobile apps Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series. -Doug Thomas

Ready to get a hands-on, in-person learning experience on how Microsoft Project can help you get more out of your projects and optimize your portfolio? Microsoft and our partner community host events in cities all around the U.S. where you'll have the opportunity to learn more about Project and what it can do to help you streamline your work and achieve your strategic objectives. Please add this page to your Favorites and check back often, as new events are regularly being scheduled! May 30th Cambridge, MA Conference 2014 Roadshow with Project Gold Certified PPM Partner Campana & Schott. Join us for these free half-day events to gain insight on current trends and the latest developments on Project Online and earn 3 PDUs. Registration link You can also register here to attend our free Project webcast series-sessions are held on the 3rd Tuesday of each month!

In this tutorial, you will lean a quick way to calculate percentages in Excel, find the basic percentage formula and a few more formulas for calculating percentage increase, percent of total and more. Calculating percentage is useful in many areas of life, whether it is restaurant tipping, reseller commission, your income tax or interest rate. Say, you've been lucky enough to get a 25% off promotion code on a new plasma TV. Is this a good deal? And how much will you eventually have to pay? In this tutorial, we are going to explore a few techniques that will help you efficiently calculate percent in Excel and learn the basic percentage formulas that will take the guesswork out of your calculations.

The AutoCorrect feature in Word 2016 fixes hundreds of common typos and spelling errors on-the-fly. You have to be quick to see it in action. For example, in Word you can't type the word mispell (with only one s). That's because AutoCorrect fixes that typo the split second that you press the spacebar. AutoCorrect also converts common text shortcuts into their proper characters. For example, type (C) and AutoCorrect properly inserts the © copyright symbol. Ditto for (TM) for the trademark. Typing - -> is translated into an arrow, and even :) becomes a happy face.

Learn about Visio, a program designed to help you make diagrams for flowcharts, room layouts, timelines, organizational charts and a lot more. We'll start at the key of Visio: understanding how its shapes work.

Remember the vintage game "Pull the Rug Out?" It is a board game where players stack different items on top of a rug. Eventually, one of the players tries to pull out the rug without tumbling the pieces stacked on top of it. Google's recent announcement that it is phasing out several additional services, including the highly popular Google Reader, reminded me of this game, as I recall that the stack most always toppled to the ground. Google introduced Google Reader, gradually built up its popularity, and then pulled the rug out with little warning, causing its customers to stumble. As one Google customer put it: "Google spends millions of wasted dollars on pet projects, then kills one of their best products on a whim." Google's most recent spring cleaning brings the total number of services it has discontinued to 70 in just a year-and-a-half. That's right-a whopping 70 services that have been shut down in just 18 months. Among the services Google will discontinue with little warning is Google Cloud Connect, introduced with a lot of fanfare just two years ago. Cloud Connect is a plug-in that enables Google users to share and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. To continue collaborating with Microsoft Office, Google users have just four weeks to uninstall Cloud Connect and install Google Drive. Companies that can't get to it by April 30 will be out of luck, leaving them without a way to collaborate on Office documents used by millions of employees, partners, and customers. But of all the services Google is discontinuing this time, the one that's drawing the biggest backlash is Google Reader, a service used by hundreds of thousands of users to keep track of their favorite websites and blogs via RSS feeds. The news of Google Reader's shut down drew outrage from users, who put together a petition demanding that Google reinstate the service. "Our confidence in Google's other products - Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus - requ