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Take your OneNote Class Notebooks wherever you go with the new “Save a copy” feature
As OneNote Class Notebooks become more popular, we’re often asked how a student or teacher can take their digital books with them when leaving school. Students graduate or change schools and would like to be able to bring the portfolio of work with them. Teachers change schools or take on a new role and also want to keep their Class Notebooks. Based on talking to lots of teachers and students, we launched the new “Save a copy” feature for Class Notebooks.
To see how this works, just follow these simple steps:
1.Sign in to OneNote Online, our web version of OneNote.
2.From the Notebook list, click Class Notebooks to display all your Class Notebooks.
3.Right-click to select a Class Notebook and then select Save a copy.
4.Click Next. You are prompted to sign in to a consumer Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, go here http://www.live.com to sign up.
That’s it! Your OneNote Class Notebook is copied to the consumer OneDrive and is available for you to use elsewhere.
This is just the initial rollout of the Save a copy feature. In the near future, we will add the ability to choose any notebook type, not just Class Notebooks. We will also roll out the Save a copy feature to your own OneDrive for Business, which will allow students to save a copy of their Class Notebook from a teacher’s OneDrive for Business to their own OneDrive for Business.
As usual, reach out on Twitter at @OneNoteEDU with questions or send us an email at ClassNotebook@onenote.uservoice.com.
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Plug in to success—7 steps for a strategic technology lifecycle
Take a minute to think about the applications you use, the programs you depend on and the technologies you’ve integrated into your business. Now ask yourself these questions: If a specific application supported my company in the past, how is it benefiting me now? Are our programs performing in line with our desired standard? What, if anything, am I doing to ensure my technology is not outdated? Is my vendor providing me with resources to manage my applications? Am I really getting the maximum business value from these solutions?
To answer these questions, many enterprise scale organizations use established processes to manage their technology. A technology lifecycle—or TLC—offers a systematic approach for assessing the state of your technologies. Thankfully, this indispensable method applies to both enterprise scale organizations and small and midsize businesses. So whether you’re an experienced IT professional or a technological tenderfoot, considering your TLC will yield promising, practical results.
TLC, defined.
Start:
Introduce yourself to the product’s benefits, programs, services and content. What’s new with the product? Who else is using it? How does it benefit them? From training resources to accessibility tools, analyzing your products’ perks in the early stages of implementation will drastically influence your business practices later on.
Decide:
Select the best product for your business. Evaluate the product to confirm its alignment with your business’s goals. Think about both your current and future needs. Is the product secure and compliant? Will the product scale with future growth? Can you connect with current product users? Is there ongoing support and training for the product? What does the future product roadmap look like? If you choose a product that is cost-effective, yet lacks specific market advantages, you may find yourself trailing behind your competitors.
Deploy:
Connect with the product’s customer services, including any deployment assistance programs, step-by-step setup guidance or visual assets. These documents will serve as a roadmap for the successful implementation of your product. Consider your strategies for product-integration. How do you plan for successful deployment and adoption? Can you find demos and guidance? What are the considerations for the businesses most like yours in similar industries, at similar size and with similar business objectives?
Manage:
Discover best practices for a successful product launch using an integrated admin console or alternative resources. How do you configure the product? How do you manage or administrate it? Are management and administration tools provided? How should you prepare for change and incidents? How can you assure your data is secure and company policies are being met? Researching practical ways for communicating the new product to employees will result in informed, confident and empowered users.
Develop:
Configure and customize the product and integrate it within your company. Develop new and extend existing features and functionalities. Connect the product with line of business applications. Is development guidance provided? Are there opportunities to learn about best practices and see how the product is being modified to solve real business goals? Budget time for aligning your company’s goals and interests with the product, choosing internal applications that further the interest of your organization.
Support:
Retain critical support contacts and information to resolve issues with your deployment and management of the product. Consider live support options including in-person, phone or chat. These options should be balanced by online troubleshooting and guidance. Is there a broad set of support options to help me address a range of potential issues? Do you get appropriate and timely notifications? Can you plan for known issues and quickly get unanticipated issues addressed?
Use:
Secure the best possible experience with your new technology for you and your end users. Invest in a product with training and adoption options designed specifically to encourage you and your company to further your understanding as you advance with your new technology. Learning how to manage and sustain the product is important for anyone in an IT or administrator role. Similarly, learning is critical for ensuring your end users get the most from your technology investments. Effective product usage can positively impact your business.
Untangle your business, simplify your mind
When assessing technology’s impact, Microsoft has committed to the TLC. In fact, Microsoft’s whole Office Suite is TLC–compatible, offering services, check-ins and pertinent information that might otherwise be unavailable to businesses. Though a technology lifecycle may be just one of the many factors a business-owner or IT professional considers when implementing new technologies in the workplace, the importance of securing quality products with strong business and support services that match your business’s needs cannot be stressed enough.
Rest assured by investing in your business, and thrive on your future success.
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Pass Through Wormhole To Online Learning
Education is a social interaction, whether online or in person, says Sally Buberman, CEO and co-founder of Wormhole. That basic concept led to the creation of the first ‘Live Learning’ platform, a new concept in online education that disrupts the foundations of traditional e-learning and builds a new experience by leveraging mobility, gamification and people interaction to create the most engaging online training programs. It’s been a journey of epic proportions, from a small startup in Argentina to a customer base of more than 2000 companies, government organizations and educational institutions in 10 countries that continues to expand.
To scientists, a wormhole is a theoretical passage through space and time that could create shortcuts for long journeys across the universe. To Sally Buberman, Max Menasches and Ignacio (Nacho) Lopez, the word translates into providing enterprises and institutions a simple way to produce content, offer online training and still retain the best of live education.
The live piece, says Buberman, engages students more effectively by giving them the ability to talk openly with instructors as if they were together in the same room instead of waiting for occasional office hours. An online but live environment tends to be less intimidating than a person-to-person environment; it allows a student to take a live class while still allowing each to have a voice by share ideas and questions in real-time.
“I was giving online lectures over the Internet,” Buberman says. “I thought, ‘Why not create a reliable online university that offers real-time interaction between teachers and students?’”
Teachers, they theorized, needed a platform where they could create and retain their own content. And students from all walks of life needed a way to interact in real-time with their teams and instructors without having to travel to a specific location. This is also true in corporate and government training programs, where the company is focused now.
Pulling Max and Nacho into her plan, the Wormhole team ultimately decided to enter the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition (in 2007) as a way to obtain feedback and validation. The nature of Microsoft’s developer competition forced them to create milestones, build their first prototype and present the idea to others. Making it to the finals inspired the trio to quit their jobs and officially form their startup.
“At the time, we had almost no money to invest,” says Buberman. “We bootstrapped from scratch, worked on the side to generate revenue and reinvested all our earnings back into our little company. That was how we managed to hire the first employees who helped us develop the first version of our product – Wormhole Campus.”
From the beginning they chose to build their foundation on a mix of .NET and other open source software (OSS) packages. Linux, for instance, is Wormhole’s core operating system; C# and Java are the core languages used by the company. To scale-out easily, the startup uses a combination of Windows Server and Ubuntu Server. Wormhole also utilizes Joomla, a PHP CMS, for marketing websites and other internal developments, as well has having native mobile apps for Android and iOS.
Other OSS packages in use at Wormhole include Redis, MySQL, Nginx, Tomcat, Jenkins, a build automation tool, Apache Ant, a Java-based build tool and NAnt, a scripting tool for .NET that helps improve build functions.
Because Wormhole’s virtual classrooms offerings are 100 percent web-based, they don't require the installation of any software. They must, however, be able to work well under very low bandwidth and poor Internet connectivity in order to reach the most people. As the startup continued to grow at a very fast pace (their platform now has over 3 million users a month), it began to rethink its infrastructure architecture.
Before moving to Azure, says Lopez, Wormhole was managing every bit of its infrastructure by itself while hosting on private virtual servers and AWS. As it began researching Microsoft Azure, it discovered that Azure’s PaaS offering and managed services like Redis Cache and SQL Azure offered a simpler infrastructure and a new generation of computing that AWS didn’t have. The development team was quite surprised at Microsoft’s support for OSS technologies – it was expecting Azure to be 100 percent Microsoft-centered.
Joining the Microsoft BizSpark program, Lopez says, was a critical turning point for the startup because of the free licensing and tools it offered. It removed cost and technology barriers Wormhole was experiencing as it expanded.
“Being supported by Microsoft makes you feel comfortable,” Lopez explains. “When you are a startup with no funding, being able to have all the Microsoft software for free together with Azure Credits is an invaluable support.”
“We read a lot before making the move to Azure and also consulted with other startups that were using OSS on Azure to get their opinion,” says Lopez. “We learned that Azure OSS support was not something Microsoft created because it had to – it really wanted to help developers. And Azure overall has better integration (than AWS) with our development tools, so we realized it would help us streamline our development and deployment processes.”
As they continued to research Azure, they saw Microsoft starting to increase the speed of Azure feature releases, a lowering of costs to meet or beat AWS and a mix of PaaS and IaaS offerings with support for Linux, PHP and Java.
“We decided we need to try it out,” he says, “especially when we saw how easy it was to use the management portal and discovered it had automation capabilities, VMs with support for Windows and Linux and worldwide data centers that could help us as we grew.”
“We are making even more use of Linux and other OSS on Azure, because it's so simple to manage and maintain!” he says.
After entering – and winning – more competitions and receiving numerous awards after the Imagine Cup journey, Wormhole developed a board of advisors comprised of well-known industry leaders. It now feels ready to pitch investors in a bid to raise capital for further international expansion.
“As an entrepreneur,” reflects Buberman, “you face many challenges every day and you fail a lot as well. The only way to survive the entrepreneurial life is if you can transform every failure into knowledge and positive experience. Use all the materials you can get hold of – you never know which one will be the turning point for your company.”
Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program.
About BizSpark: Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.
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Case Study: UniKey
“I’ve never been a fan of traditional keys,” says UniKey founder Dumas, an electrical engineer with a background in biometrics security. “Keys literally, in their current form, have more or less been around for 1,100 years, and I just felt a passion for unlocking things in new and unique ways.”
In April, UniKey raised $10 million in a Series A round of venture capital funding to propel additional products to market. That was nearly two years after UniKey and its first residential lock partner, Kwikset, launched Kevo. Kevo is a secure, one-step, Bluetooth-enabled smart lock, now available for resale in five countries.
“That one step is touching your door, which is about as simple as it gets,” says Dumas.
BizSpark helped UniKey save money in its early days, and now Azure is helping UniKey expand into new markets. The company uses Azure Cloud Services, Service Bus, Redis and Linux Virtual Machines, which hosts UniKey’s Ruby on Rails MyKevo.com site.
“Microsoft Azure affords UniKey the information and flexibility to immediately respond to ever-growing customer demand,” says Dumas.
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