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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. I'm a firm believer in story telling as a means to engage employees with the "why" behind what we do as a company - and sometimes what we stop doing - and in the spring of 2012 we had a big story to tell. Our first National Hiring Day was happening in Jamba stores across the country as we prepared to hire thousands of new employees and ramp up for our busy summer season. We'd organized the event through traditional channels: our intranet, email, weekly task management publications, and pre-event conference calls. And we had big plans to collect photographs, interview hiring managers, and write up a recap to share the success stories with everyone after the fact. On the big day I logged into Yammer and got a big surprise. The event was unfolding in glorious detail right as it happened with photos, comments, personal stories, and genuine pride and enthusiasm for the Jamba brand just pouring out. We never wrote that recap.

Bella Engen is a Technical Writer on the SharePoint User Content Publishing team, focused on search-driven experiences. Cross-site publishing is a new publishing method in SharePoint Server 2013 that can help streamline the publishing process in your organization, and at the same time reduce costs associated with maintaining and updating your website. By combining cross-site publishing with SharePoint search features, you can reduce the number of pages needed to maintain your website, and gain flexibility in how content is presented to your customers. In a nutshell, cross-site publishing simplifies the authoring experience by separating the process of how content is authored from the process of how content is displayed. SharePoint search features enable you to add user-specific behavior to your website, such as displaying different content to different customer groups, or displaying recommendations based on user behavior. In a blog series on the SharePoint IT Pro blog, you can learn how you can use SharePoint Server 2013 to set up a website that is based on product catalog data. The blog posts describe the different functionalities that are involved when setting up such a site, and show you step-by-step how the features are configured. To demonstrate how it all comes together, data from a fictitious company is used. The blog posts use several screenshots and diagrams to explain everything from how the cross-site publishing feature works, to how you can use search features to influence how product data is displayed to visitors on a site. To give you an idea of what type of site this blog series describes, here are a few screenshots of the final website:

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.

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team. Visually displaying always up-to-date information on clearly laid out diagrams helps to communicate information effectively. In this post, we will see how to connect data from external sources to a diagram.

If you're a fan of PowerPoint, you may have heard about Microsoft's latest presentation tool, Microsoft Sway. With Sway, you can create and share presentations like never before! In today's blog, we'll give you a basic overview as to what Sway can do as well as some of our personal favorite features. Let's dive in!

If you've got a really killer PowerPoint presentation but would like to extract all the information to Microsoft Word - you can. Sometimes this is necessary because the size of your PowerPoint presentation is rather large and you would like to share it with others over email or an intranet. Converting it to Word will help reduce the size and make it easier to view for everyone involved. It's also possible that you would like your slides presented as thumbnails, with or without speaker notes included, for easier reviewing, editing, or handing out during the presentation itself. You can convert your presentation in one of three ways. The directions for converting on a Mac OS and a Windows OS are as follows. If you're feeling a bit ambitious, why not become a PowerPoint Ninja?

You have 15 minutes of your Senior Manager's time. Your goal: encourage his/her participation on Yammer. What are the three items you would focus on? Sounds like an awesome challenge, doesn't it? This was exactly the challenge that one of our customers Ernst Décsey, Intranet Manager from UNICEF posed in the YCN, Yammer Champion Community. His question was greeted with a flurry of amazing responses, which we just had to share here (with participants' permissions of course!)

In order to be taken seriously, small businesses need to convince customers of their professional ability and their value. Small businesses can punch above their weight by taking the time to go to market with a professional set of business documents, templates and content to ensure customers aren't dismissing them before they have a chance to pitch the value of their product or service.

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Microsoft Community Summit about communities of practice - their business value, how they are different from other internal and external communities, and strategies for success in starting them up and growing them in a sustainable way. I invite you to view the presentation embedded below; here are some main points.

We're excited to announce a major upgrade for our Outlook.com app for Android devices that overhauls the entire user interface and provides a number of new features. You can get the latest app here.

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.

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.

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 Outlook 2016 release focuses mainly on de-cluttering the user interface and simplifying your workflow. Microsoft Outlook is the world's most favored business email client. The application already offers excellent integration with contacts, calendars, notes, tasks, and of course, email.