Skype Meeting Broadcast is a new component of Skype for Business. As part of Office 365 and Skype for Business Online, Skype Meeting Broadcast lets you produce, host, and broadcast meetings to large online audiences.
How Skype Meeting Broadcast works
You can schedule a Skype Meeting Broadcast for up to 10,000 attendees. You use the Skype Meeting Broadcast scheduling and management portal to schedule a meeting.
You use the familiar meeting experience within Skype for Business to produce a professional, engaging event for their audience. And, attendees can join from anywhere on any device, and engage in the meeting.
Skype Meeting Broadcast roles
There are several roles required for producing a Skype Meeting Broadcast. These include:
Organizer. Creates the meeting request and invites attendees. Reviews meeting reports.
Producer. Manages the meeting sources (live presentations, dial-in presentations, audio, video, and PowerPoint decks), records the event, and posts the recording to Office 365 Video.
Note: Using an embedded video in a PowerPoint presentation is currently not supported in Skype Meeting Broadcast.
Event team member. Participates in the meeting by presenting live or dialing in from a remote location.
Attendee. Watches the event online.
System requirements
System requirements for a Skype Meeting Broadcast
Browser (attendees) - Internet Explorer 11, Chrome, Firefox, OSX Safari, iOS 8 or later, Android (KitKat)
Client - Skype for Business client for Windows (producer, presenter)
For Skype for Business 2015 clients, you must have the September Update, build 15.0.4747 or later
For Skype for Business 2016 clients, you must be using Click-to-Run, build 16.0.4227 or later. (MSI installations only support the presenter role. Producers can join through a different client, as explained in this knowledge base article.
Lync for Mac 2011 (presenter only). See this knowledge base article for more information.
Find your client version information in Skype for Business by clicking Help > About Skype for Business.
Users - On-premises and online
License - You will need one of the following licenses:
Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 (or 3).
Office 365 Business Premium
Enterprise E1, E3, E4 or E5 - which contains the Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 license.
Authentication - On-premises customers must have established an online tenant. You should configure directory sync to make user accounts and DL memberships available to the Skype for Business Azure Active Directory in order to enable user authentication and meeting authorization using group membership.
Skype Meeting Broadcast producers cannot be enabled for modern authentication.
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New Office 365 profiles help people get to know their coworkers
Microsoft has unveiled a new profile page for Office 365 users aimed at making it easier to collaborate at work.
The profile pages, most accessible through Microsoft's Delve product, show a large photo of the worker, along with the files shared between that person and whoever is viewing their profile. The new feature, announced Tuesday, is a way for people to get a sense of their coworkers' responsibilities, even if they don't work in the same office.
An Office 365 user's profile also shows who they work with inside an organization, allowing the viewer to get a sense for how someone else fits into the business.
The new experience replaces a somewhat unwieldy two-page profile that Microsoft currently uses in Delve. Right now, users can see the files that someone else shares with them when they open up that person's profile, but have to switch to a different tab to get contact information.
With the new profile Microsoft is rolling out, the information will be on the same page, along with a button that lets users Skype their coworkers.
When people look at their own profile, they'll see the documents they've worked on recently.
Companies that have opted to get Microsoft's First Release updates for Office 365 will get the new profiles first over the next several weeks, and everyone else can expect to see the pages by the second quarter of this year.
It's all part of Microsoft's continued emphasis on helping people collaborate at work. Office 365 is focused on not only providing standby tools like Word and Excel, but also on new collaboration services that tie them together through features like real-time co-authoring.
As Microsoft faces increased competition with Google, Facebook, Slack and other companies for the workplace productivity business, these sorts of features are increasingly important.
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Take pictures and insert them directly into your presentation, additional cloud storage partners, and more. See what's new here in February here
February has been another busy month for releases across our Office clients on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. There are a number of exciting new capabilities in Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In addition, we released the first cumulative feature update since the initial September release of the Office 2016 apps—otherwise known as the “Deferred Channel” build—for our commercial customers. Read on for the details.
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Introducing boards in Office Delve—a new way to organize and share work
As Office Delve continues to roll out to Office 365 business customers, we love hearing about how people are using this new, innovative experience to discover and explore content that’s relevant to the work they and their teams are doing. Using Office Graph, an intelligent fabric that applies machine learning to content and interactions occurring in Office 365, Delve helps you get back to pertinent documents, discover relevant content that has been shared with you, and search for information related to subjects you care about.
Now, we are taking the next step by making it easier to organize all the valuable content that gets surfaced in Delve. We are excited to introduce a new feature in Delve called boards that help you organize content, so it’s readily accessible and easy to share with others.
In Delve, you can use boards to group together and share related documents. For example, you can create a board to collect and organize all documents related to a specific project your team is working on. Everyone in your organization can view and contribute to an existing board or create a board—but they can only see and open documents that they have permission to access.
Take a look at this video to learn how boards helps people organize content from across Office 365:
Add to your boards, discover new ones
When working with others, information tends to get scattered. And that’s OK. Organizing around ideas and topics with boards is easy and powerful. Just click + Add to board, enter a board name or pick from a list of existing boards.
Any card you see in Delve can be added to a board—documents, sites, videos and more.
Boards allow you to discover content related to topics and projects and make it easy to return to the content that matters most to you. From within Delve, you can search for a board, follow it to stay informed and discover other boards—all without having to know or remember where individual pieces of content live.
Your boards are always at hand. Add to your boards, discover new ones or follow them to stay up-to-date.
Collaborative, open gathering of ideas
Every board is a unique collection of ideas and information that others can discover and contribute to. Just as any view within Delve, boards only surface the content you have permissions to see.
Collaborating gets easier too. You simply share the URL of a board with your team, or click Send a link directly from the board, which remains fresh as your team works on and updates those documents over time.
Looking ahead
The journey with boards starts with Delve to help you stay organized as you collaborate on documents and discover new content. Going forward, the “Add to board” functionality will serve as a basis for new content curation and knowledge management scenarios within Office 365, in line with our vision for Next Gen Portals recently outlined with the introduction of Office 365 Video.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Matter Center Helps Legal Firms Do Better Business
As you might imagine, Microsoft employs one of the largest corporate legal teams in the world. Having access to Microsoft’s development team, the legal team has used tools such as Office 365 extensively and has benefited from customization of those tools to enhance their utility in a legal environment. If you’re legal professional you’re probably asking yourself how this helps you. Well the great news is that Microsoft is now making these enhancements more broadly available to their legal professional customers through an add-in called Matter Center.
By working with a Microsoft partner, like Managed Solutions, your firm will be able to enjoy the enhancements made possible through the work of Microsoft’s Legal & Corporate Affairs (LCA) team. Once installed, Matter Center allows your team to create or view legal matters right from Outlook; tie Word, Excel, OneNote and other files to those matters; and securely collaborate with other legal professionals inside or outside your organization.
By working with nearly 200 law firms and partners in the legal industry, the LCA team was able to solicit feedback and input that went into building a world-class solution for the legal profession. Learn more about the development of Matter Center by the LCA team in this short video.
Here’s a quick rundown of the key benefits that will make Matter Center a game-changer for your legal practice:
Complete integration with Office 365 – Create and view right from Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote and all the tools your team already has experience with.
Seamless mobile experience – Access Office 365 and Matter Center across all devices – PCs, Macs, tables and phones whether using Windows, Apple or Android OS.
Powerful and intuitive search and data visualization – You can easily and quickly search, find and retrieve matters and related documents across all cases.
Pinning and tagging – Track and pin frequently used matters and documents for easy access.
Learn more about boosting productivity for your office, both your team of legal professionals and for any IT professionals you employ or contract, with Office 365 and Matter Center.
Running Matter Center in the cloud will require Office 365 and Azure subscriptions. Matter Center has been designed to support multiple deployment configurations as well, whether on-premises or hybrid cloud. Managed Solutions can help your firm implement Office 365 and Matter Center quickly and cost-effectively. You can scale up and out at a pace that makes sense for your practice.
Earlier this year we announced real-time co-authoring support for Word 2016 as part of the Office 2016 Preview. For the last several months, this feature has been available to preview users co-authoring Word documents stored on SharePoint Online. Today, we are pleased to announce that real-time co-authoring is also available as a first-look for Word documents stored on OneDrive as part of the latest Office 2016 Preview release.
Now when two or more users running the latest preview open the same Word document from OneDrive, they can co-author with others in real-time, which allows them to see the cursor location and text edits made by the other users automatically appear as they happen.
You are encouraged to try real-time co-authoring on OneDrive today. If you are receiving regular updates throughout the preview, you should have received this functionality as an update by 11 a.m. this morning.
To try out this feature, all you need is a Word document stored on OneDrive and two or more people running the latest preview. Make sure to give both users edit permissions so they can both edit the file. If this is the first time you’ve tried real-time co-authoring, you will see a prompt in the upper right corner of Word asking you if you’d like to automatically share your changes.
All you need to do is click Yes to join the experience. Once both authors have clicked Yes, you’ll see a flag representing the other author’s cursor position and then you will automatically see their edits come in.
Getting work done often requires working not only within the company boundaries but also working beyond the firewall with business contacts who do not fall within your corporate domain. We’ve been hard at work to enhance the external sharing user experience so that sharing is more and more friction free, for both users and admins.
As such, we’ve made the following improvements to SharePoint Online and Office 365:
Get a link: create anonymous Guest Links in one click within
the Office 365 user interface.
Members can share: enable site members to invite external users, not
just the site collection owner.
All invitees on same
email To line: start a collaborative email with *everyone* when sharing a site or document.
These new external sharing updates are rolling out live worldwide right now.
Let’s dive into the details.
Get a link
It’s now possible, in one click, to generate a Guest Link (either a View Only or Edit anonymous link to a document) directly from your SkyDrive Pro and your SharePoint Online document libraries’ user interface. You click, copy and paste, and go. And when you no longer want the Guest Link to be active, you can disable it at any time from the document’s same Share dialog box.
The External Sharing dialog box now has a merged Invite people tab, a Get a link tab and a Shared with tab, so all the ways to share are in one place.
Members can share
Much of SharePoint Online and Office 365 is about administration delegation: empowering others to make the right business decisions, paired with giving them the right levels of control. Site collection admins can now allow members of the site to send a sharing invitation-both internal and external-without requiring the site collection admin to first approve/reject the invitation request. This removes a common barrier to sharing while enabling finer grain control per your preferred governance and productivity plans.
We’ve made it easier to notify all recipients at the same time, on the same email. Now, when you share with multiple people via the sharing dialog box in SharePoint Online, a single email message is sent to everyone you shared with-with you included on the Cc line-rather than sending a separate email to each recipient. Note: external email addresses typed in the people picker will still send individual external invitations, because external invitees need unique invitation links that properly route them through the external sharing process associated with Microsoft Account.
From the Share dialog box in SharePoint Online, you can share with multiple recipients with a single email message. Email recipients see all invitees on the To line.
Start sharing
Whether you’re collaborating with employees, customers, partners or suppliers, we hope the new set of external sharing enhancements helps you work more efficiently, delegate effectively, and collaborate.
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Goodyear brings spirit of innovation to every facet of product development and delivery
It’s been said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. At The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, that’s never been truer—innovation is an integral part of the culture at Goodyear. From the continual evolution of our tires, manufacturing processes and information systems, innovation is present just about everywhere in our business. We have a market-oriented innovation strategy, which means we combine the needs and desires of our tire consumers with technology to create tires and service solutions that add value and distinguish our branded products from our competition.
In fact, we made the tire-buying process easier for consumers in North America when we recently launched an e-commerce program where consumers can purchase tires online. We’re the first tire manufacturer in North America to offer this kind of service, which is just another example of the continuous evolution of our sales program.
Sustaining this level of innovation throughout Goodyear depends on three essential elements: our people, processes and technology. Hiring the right people with the right skills at the right time is a critical component to ongoing innovation. We work hard to attract talented associates. Once they’re on board, we want them to succeed, so we make sure to put them in positions where they can be challenged and they have opportunities to grow and contribute. We also bring modern technologies to bear, providing our associates with useful solutions like Microsoft Office 365.
As a global company, we need to ensure that our associates are able to work effectively together as a team from anywhere. The better the communication and collaboration mechanisms that we give them, the more productive they can be. To that end, it’s never been easier for our associates to connect than it is today. With Office 365, they conduct meetings with geographically dispersed team members using Skype for Business Online, exchange instant messages for quick issue resolution and participate in enterprise social networking to bring creative ideas to the surface.
We’ve also made mobile productivity easier, supporting our associates with greater flexibility in how they handle their work. In the past, associates could take a laptop and work from home or elsewhere once they logged on via a virtual private network. But what we’re finding now is that associates are collaborating from home and elsewhere, using Office 365 to work closely with decentralized teams. We’ve always seen a certain amount of remote working, but now that associates are tethered even less to their laptops, they feel they can connect and get things done from anywhere.
One of our associates told a story about how he was driving to work on the way to an 8 a.m. meeting. Suddenly someone in front of him got a flat tire, so he pulled over to help the person, knowing that it would cause him to be late for his meeting. Then he realized that he had his phone with him and all he had to do was click the Skype for Business URL and join the meeting on time from his parked car after helping out. It was that easy for him. He wouldn’t have been able to do both in the past. Since road safety is one of our primary tenets of civic responsibility at Goodyear, we were happy he was able to help that individual and still participate in the meeting from his roadside location.
Taking advantage of Office 365 to give our associates that sort of flexibility helps us accommodate the current convergence between personal and work life. It’s more and more natural now for someone to handle a personal item while at work and a work-related item from home.
Simplifying associate collaboration is the most important way Office 365 supports innovation at Goodyear. Whether it’s co-authoring a document in Microsoft SharePoint Online, brainstorming with a team using Yammer or Skype Meetings or using presence to see who’s online to answer a question quickly—the way we use Office 365 services to streamline the collaboration process is a key contributor to our enhanced ability to innovate.
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