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Cloud, Collaboration, and Today's Workforce
Businesses are looking to digitally transform their companies. IDC predicts that by the end of 2017, two-thirds of Global 2000 companies will have digital transformation at the center of their corporate strategy. No matter the industry, businesses of all sizes are prioritizing having modern infrastructure, easy-to-use tools and programs for their workers, best-in-class devices and making things easy for their customers. A truly digital businesses share a common trait: they collaborate differently.
In my perspective, there are two main ways that the nature of collaboration has changed:
Sharing access – The era of email attachments is coming to a close. In the cloud era, instead of passing a document back and forth, documents are co-authored – edits are made live and in real-time.
Crossing distances – The cloud allows team members to collaborate and communicate from anywhere. So the “office” of a contemporary company is wherever its workers happen to be at the moment.
For those of us who have been in the workforce awhile, these advancements are phenomenal, because the paradigm used to be so different. But those newer in the workforce have difference expectations.
To them, sharing access and crossing vast distances don’t really feel like advancements. Having grown up alongside these technologies, collaboration is just a part of work. In fact, that is the only conceivable way to work. Any business seeking to transform to be more cloud-ready and digital has to take this into account to bring in the best new talent to their teams.
Everyone knows that technologies like social media have completely changed the dynamics of corporate recruitment and hiring. But technology has also become a consideration for workers as they weigh their job options.
Modern workers spend the majority of their day interfacing with technology, so antiquated tools can be detrimental to their job satisfaction. In fact, a recent survey we conducted, showed that millennials in the workforce demand adequate technology to do their jobs. More than 90 percent of respondents said the latest technology was important in choosing an employer.
To appeal to these workers, business leaders have to recognize how they prefer to get their work done.
Shared access — How are files shared and edited at your company? Do you ever lose track of where something is or which team member “owns” it? These are hindrances that today’s workers will find it hard to tolerate. And collaborating via the cloud all but makes them obsolete.
Crossing distances — How do you organize your teams? Based on where people are located, or on who has the right skills and experience for a project? The best employee for the task may not be right down the hall from you. And the best new hire for your company may not be in the same city as you.
One great example of this modern way of working is an SMB out of the U.K., Bounce Foods. The company is the creator of Bounce Energy Balls, a healthy choice for people snacking on-the-go. Bounce Foods, like many high-growth companies, was faced with effectively managing a growing customer base, while rolling out new products and working to expand into new stores. Making the right technology decisions was a key to their success and ability to scale.
In order to keep up with their accelerated growth, Bounce Foods needed to choose tools to better collaborate internally and engage with customers externally and also keep track of processes, resources and information. As their business became more complex they decided to move to Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Azure, Dynamics CRM and Office 365 with Power BI. These solutions helped them to scale their business.
Now, they are able to quickly respond to demand and instantly collaborate on what needs to get done. Their employees are more efficient and are able to deliver better customer service, retailer’s questions are quickly answered by the right people in the company, they can appropriately manage their stock and the overall company is better informed and better connected. Bounce Foods has scaled from 200,000 Bounce Balls per month to 600,000 in just two years. And today their product is sold in major supermarkets, gyms and retail stores.
It’s this level of technology and collaboration capabilities that employees now expect from their employers. The flexibility of the cloud is massively appealing for fast-growing companies. The functionality that it provides can in turn help ensure that companies are appealing to the right type of employee.
Every business and every business leader has to prioritize not only the needs to digitize their company but also how to enable the collaboration that workers today expect.
Using the cloud to expand your concept of collaboration doesn’t just introduce new efficiencies for your organization, it can help make your company more attractive to the best and brightest in today’s workforce.
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Happy Eat What You Want Day!
By Kelly Cronin
May 11th is national Eat What You Want Day - so you can put away the organic quinoa salad wraps and whip up your favorite, yummy meals (or just some delicious treats and pretend they count as a meal for today). With OneNote, finding recipes online and storing them all in one place has never been easier. In honor of this awesome springtime holiday, Managed Solution wants to show you how we're celebrating Eat What You Want Day with some of our favorite recipes, as well as tips and tricks for using OneNote in the kitchen!
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Parmesan Crusted Tortellini Bites
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Create a page for each new recipe, with the title of what you want to make. You can insert the link of where you got the recipe from, so you can always go back and double check that you have all the ingredients and directions down correctly.
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Make a "To-Do-List" for all your ingredients. This keeps them organized, so you can check off each one as you grab it at the grocery store. Use the OneNote App on your phone at the store to check it off as you're shopping, and it will update your list on your computer, too!
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Have trouble remembering what steps you've already done? Cross out each line as you go, that way you won't have to struggle to remember whether you've added one or two cups of cheese already.
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Nutella Buttercream Frosting
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OneNote has a variety of different Tags you can choose from, to highlight, note, or remind yourself of certain things. Want to use this recipe for your Mom's birthday? Put a reminder at the top!
Use these tags to signify what's important in the recipe. Always forget to only add 2-3 tbsp of milk instead of all 4? Use the highlighter tool to make sure the measurement catches your eye. If you're sending the recipe to someone else, you might want to let them know what a key step in the recipe is. For example, when you make this frosting, it will not come out right until you add that last cup of powdered sugar, so add a critical tag next to that step.
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Chicken Fajita Pasta
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If you have a really wordy recipe, the highlighter tool can be really handy to help you pick out which ingredients you need for each step. Instead of spending your time squinting at the recipe, quickly check to see what you need and when you need it.
Easily insert multiple items on OneNote, including PDF documents, word documents, file attachments, images, links, equations, and even audio recordings. Sometimes trying to remember what a recipe is just based off the name can be hard - so add a picture to show what the food ends up looking like! It will inspire you to make your version just as eye-catching (and yummy, too!)
Adding an audio recording is an awesome way to put feedback about recipes that you might not be able to describe with text. If you want to remind yourself to add more pepper next time, but your hands are too sticky to type all that, just use a quick audio recording on your OneNote. You can always play it back later and write down what you say, or simply leave it as it is. Want to really get fancy? Try recording your whole cooking process - you'll be a Top Chef in the making!
Happy Eat Whatever You Want Day - go forth and indulge.
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By Maxence Grugier as written on techcrunch.com
Many artists use as material for art the raw data produced by our societies, seeking innovative means of display or transforming it into a work of art. By blurring boundaries between art and information, data art dispels the myth of the romantic artist while offering a fundamental artistic act in a critical commentary of the digital age in which we live.
An age that is supposedly open and yet increasingly obscure or incomprehensible to non-specialists. By re-appropriating these reams of information, or big data, data artists reintroduce fantasy to an age of increasingly abstract data and concepts.
The objective of data art is to create aesthetic forms and artistic works from the digital nature of the data generated from big data (graphics, simulations, worksheets, statistics, etc.). Any virtual data produced by our environment can be transformed into images, objects or sounds. Data art also presents the underlying links that exist between the ubiquitous algorithms in our lives — figures from databases, raw data, data collected by search engines, calculations and statistics (geographical, political, climatic, financial) and artistic creation.
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Art and information technology are still unfortunately widely perceived as evolving in two conflicting worlds, but a new generation of artists working in the field of electronic media cannot afford to consider the world — and art — in these terms. Using media and IT tools is a creative process that is natural for them (this usually involves information technology: software development; programming; data analysis; algorithms; documentation and meta-data retrieval on the Internet, etc.).
This still-emerging aesthetic trend offers a new interpretation of the increasingly “mathematical” and rationalist world in which we live, re-enchanting the everyday life of homo technologicus. For these artists, this techno-scientific vision only touches the surface of another, much more complex, secret and marvelous world — a world that also speaks volumes, a world of data and information.
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Algorithms and data flow
The world in which we live is almost entirely governed by algorithms. An algorithm is a sequence of computer instructions, applied systematically by a machine, or by software. In the past, an operator instructed a computer and commands were performed. With algorithms, the computer carries out automatic tasks alone, unassisted.
Some algorithms are the syndication’s key participants (subscription to a data flow; for example, RSS flow). They search for information and send it to the user registered on a “syndication feed.” Of course, other algorithms pick up the same data. These programs capture — and therefore propose — content, according to prior choices made by the user (on Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.); these are flow aggregators and big data collectors.
The current quantitative explosion of digital data streams requires new ways for this information to be visualized. The processing of the research, retrieval, storage and analysis of this data is still an emerging sector, but it provides work for evaluation and analysis specialists, as well as for artists. Processing this extremely complex and diversified data is responsible for a brand new economic sector emerging in the field of information technology, along with new forms of artistic creation.
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Data visualization, the first step in data art
Data visualization has become a fundamental discipline as more and more businesses, local councils and public services are forced to invent visually amusing and striking ways to classify dig data generated by the movements in populations, their patterns of consumption, communication and travel, etc.
The first step in the world of data art consists of addressing how to view this data. Amongst the pioneers of this discipline, previously solely scientific and devoted to graphical representations of statistical data, are theorist Edward Tufte, responsible for the creation of sparklines (a concise graphic format developed for insertion in text), and Ben Shneiderman, who invented treemap in 1990.
Amongst the other graphical representation techniques and terminology, there are bar charts, pie charts (better known as Camembert or Donut Chart), scatter graphs, lines, bubbles, heat maps, (mapping of “hotspots”), etc. They all refer to the different ways of making visually attractive and, above all, understandable the reams of data (also called “datascapes”) that shape our everyday lives.
Data visualization, often generating extremely complex graphics, sometimes becomes artistic. Matt Willey, for example, draws inspiration from these forms with At This Rate and 2060 Poster, to show the impact of the economy and human activities on the environment.
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The origins of data art
To give a timeline to the origins of what is today known as data art (also called information art or informatism), reference should be made to the minimalist artist Kynaston McShine and his exhibition “Information,” given at the MoMA in 1970.
By choosing to present the combination of science, informatics and information technology with the most classical forms of art (including performance art, visual art, digital art and conceptual art), McShine proposes a first definition of data art. In the MoMA exhibition catalogue, he wrote: “Increasingly artists use mail, telegrams, telex machines, etc., for transmission of works themselves — photographs, films, documents — or of information about their activity.”
For Kynaston McShine, art and information already formed one single progressive movement, in a period literally “made of information.” Other signs of data art are also apparent amongst pioneers of generative art, an artistic form calling upon computer-generated creation via algorithms and computer language.
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However, before the advent of today’s extremely complex forms of data art, there were works like those by the artist Mark Napier, part of the generative art movement, who produced Black and White, a work based on the stream of information captured by “Carnivore,” a software program developed by the FBI in the 2000s.
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An increasing number of facets of our existence interact with each other through the multiple flow networks forming today’s information landscape. A historical and technological context that inspired Julian Oliver, for example, with Packet Garden, a project depicting our movements on the web portrayed as incredible engineered gardens, and Jason Salavon who, with American Varietal, offers a creative view of American ethnic plurality.
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These intricately linked communication and movements are then assembled in huge databases by the algorithmic machine. This is what, for example, inspired one of the pioneers of data art, Aaron Koblin, with Flight Patterns (2009), a data art classic visualizing air traffic, a material representation of worldwide communication.
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Others, like the German artist Stefan Sagmeister, wish to resume the immaterial and abstract appearance of figures, streams and data recovery program. Move Your Money is a humorous, 3D inflatable metaphor — based on children’s bouncy inflatable castles — to make international monetary flows tangible.
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In a more amusing — and rock ‘n roll — way, with The Long Black Veil, the artist Jeffrey Docherty creates an intangible map of the 1980s Punk and New Wave scene. Love Will Tear Us Apart Again by Peter Crnokrak is a diagram of the emotional impact of the resumption of Joy Division hit Love Will Tear Us Apart in different countries and by different interpreters. With Serendipity in 2014, Kyle McDonald proposes a map connecting people listening to the same piece at the same time on Spotify.
Poetic flows
Creative apps and imagination are considerable in this field. The goal of data art, inspired by very down-to-earth techniques to visualize data, is above all to make the invisible visible. However, by formatting these reams of data, data artists are not content with making legible the mesh of information from which it is formed, they also take a critical look at our society.
By appropriating this intangible flow of data, data artists position themselves as observers and testify to behaviors, inferring details about mankind, the eternal demiurge — whether artists or sociologists, mathematicians or business men — for whom data collection indicates a compulsive need to control their even most abstract environment.
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However, with the evolution of generative graphics and data capture techniques, contemporary data art artists sometimes go beyond criticism to deliver instantly beautiful works of art that speak for themselves… almost.
This is the case with Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, with We Feel Fine, an exploration of human emotions, or Reynald Drouhin with Internet Protocol City, a generator of “ghost towns” transforming the IP addresses of Internet users into monochrome buildings, when abstract and cold data changes into the pure state of metaphoric beauty.
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What’s new in Office 365 administration
Customize your dashboard—We understand you use some features more regularly than others. You can now customize your admin center dashboard to make it a truly personal experience:
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You can now drag the tiles to put the ones you care about right at your fingertips.
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By default, the dashboard shows the Users, Billing, What’s new and Discover and Learn tiles. To add additional tiles, such as Service health, Message center or Reports, click Add.
Note: If you’ve installed Windows Azure Active Directory Sync Tool (DirSync), you’ll also see the DirSync tile.
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Remove tiles you don’t need.
We’ll keep working on customization, so you’ll see additional functionality soon—including shortcuts to the admin centers for SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and others. Click Feedback in the admin center to let us know if there’s something you’d like us to add.
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Customize the Office 365 experience for your end users—The new admin center now allows you to change the look and feel of Office 365 for your end users. You can include your company logo, adjust background images and align colors to have them better match your company brand. Customizing the end user experience will help your end users identify closer with your company and also reduce the chances of a phishing attack as your users can easily identify that they are on an official company site. To access this feature, click Settings and then Organization Profile.
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Quickly get help with improved search—In addition to users, groups, tasks, settings and pages, you can now use the search at the top of the home dashboard to search for help topics. Simply type the topic you need help with in the search bar to quickly get more information.
Access additional usage reports while complying with compliance requirements—In April, we completed the rollout of new usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business and Yammer, which gives IT greater visibility into usage across these services in Office 365 down to the individual user level. We continue our work to include more reports in the new admin center, including mailbox storage, SharePoint activity and OneDrive activity, to provide you with a complete picture of how your organization is using Office 365.
If your organization policies don’t allow visibility into user-level details at this granularity, or if you want to share the data with other stakeholders, you can now anonymize the user-level information. This option is available under the Settingsmenu.
Edit more user details simultaneously—The new admin center now provides you with ability to edit more user details simultaneously for a group of people, including contact details, user roles, domains and sign-in status. For example, if your organization’s address changes, you can update this information for all your users with just a few simple clicks. On theActive users page, simply check the boxes of the users that you want to edit and then select the information you want to make changes to in the fly-out window.
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Quickly forward a user’s email—Forwarding email messages of a user to another co-worker is often a time critical action. In the new admin center, you can now enable mail forwarding directly from the user card. On the Active userspage, simply click on the user whose email you want to forward and then click Edit email forwarding.
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In addition, we added the ability to add guest users from outside your company to an Office 365 group.
If the new admin center is not your default experience yet, you can directly sign in at the admin center portal. Or you can click the Try it today link at the top of the old admin center.
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