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In February, we announced the availability of the Microsoft Learning Tools Immersive Reader on Word Online and OneNote Online. As a result of customer demand, we are pleased to announce that Immersive Reader is now available for Outlook.com, Outlook on the web and the OneNote Windows 10 app. Immersive Reader includes a view that utilizes techniques proven to help people read more effectively, such as:

• Read Aloud—Reads text out loud with simultaneous highlighting that improves decoding, fluency and comprehension while sustaining the reader’s focus and attention.

• Spacing—Optimizes font spacing in a narrow column view to improve reading fluency for users with visual crowding issues.

• Syllables—Shows the breaks between syllables to enhance word recognition and decoding.

• Parts of Speech—Supports writing instruction and grammar comprehension by identifying verbs, nouns and adjectives.

In addition to the Immersive Reader rollout across new apps and platforms, we are also adding new language and geographic availability for the Read Aloud, Syllables and Parts of Speech features. This expanded language support—coming to Word Online, OneNote Online, Outlook on the web and the OneNote Windows 10 app—will allow more customers across the world to experience the benefits of both the Learning Tools and the Immersive Reader. For the OneNote Desktop Learning Tools add-in, we are launching Japanese dictation, plus bug fixes and other small improvements. See all of the details at the Learning Tools language support page.

And finally, we are excited to announce the availability of Try it out—an updated and enhanced capability on the recently redesigned Microsoft Learning Tools landing page. Try it out allows anyone to quickly and easily try out the Immersive Reader, without needing an Office 365 ID or a Microsoft account. We hope these announcements enable more people to read in a way that works best for them, and we look forward to hearing impactful stories from more of you, such as this story about empowering students to read in a new way.

Immersive Reader brings increased accessibility to Outlook on the web

In talking with customers, a common request we heard was to bring the same Immersive Reader capabilities of Word Online and OneNote Online to those accessing Outlook via the web. Starting today, the Immersive Reader will begin rolling out to Outlook.com and Outlook on the web worldwide.

There are several ways to launch the Immersive Reader in Outlook on the web or Outlook.com:

• On any received message, select the Reply all drop-down and then select Show in immersive reader.

• Right-click any message and select Show in immersive reader.

• From the main message view, click the … and select Show in immersive reader.

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The new Immersive Reader for Outlook on the web and Outlook.com will be available in many languages and countries. Visit the Learning Tools language support page to learn more.

Immersive Reader comes to the OneNote Windows 10 app

Since the release of Learning Tools for OneNote Desktop, many customers have asked for these same capabilities in our OneNote Windows 10 app. With the June OneNote Windows 10 app update, the Immersive Reader will be available to all customers via the View menu and will be pre-installed.

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The new Immersive Reader in OneNote Windows 10 will be available in many languages and countries. Visit the Learning Tools language support page to learn more.

Expanding the global reach of the Immersive Reader

Since the Immersive Reader rolled out to Word Online and OneNote Online in February, customers all over the world asked us to expand these capabilities to more languages. Today, we are pleased to announce that Read Aloud is now available in 14 new languages and geographies, including:

• Arabic (Saudi Arabia)

• Czech

• English (Ireland)

• French (Switzerland)

• German (Austria)

• German (Switzerland)

• Greek

• Hebrew

• Hindi

• Hungarian

• Indonesian

• Romanian

• Slovak

• Thai

In addition, the Syllables feature is being added to four languages: Hungarian, Indonesian, Romanian and Slovak.

Finally, the Parts of Speech feature for German, Italian and Dutch will be enabled for Word Online, OneNote Online and Outlook on the web in the next few weeks. Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Brazilian Portuguese languages will be available later this summer.

Visit the Learning Tools language support page to see the current list of languages for the Immersive Reader.

Try it out—the updated and enhanced landing page for Learning Tools

With the recent interest and popularity of the Learning Tools and the Immersive Reader, we wanted to allow anyone to quickly try out the functionality through any web browser and experience all its benefits and features. We recently updated our Learning Tools landing page with the Try it out function that immediately launches the Immersive Reader. You can also put your own custom text in and try it out. The new Try it out feature supports 39 languages, so people from around the world can immediately experience the Immersive Reader.

Japanese dictation language added to the OneNote Desktop Learning Tools add-in

Support for Japanese dictation on OneNote Desktop has been added, in addition to bug fixes and stability improvements to the add-in. You can grab the latest version (v1.3) of the OneNote Desktop Learning Tools add-in on the Microsoft Learning Tools page.

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Quorum reimagines the possibilities of oil and gas with Microsoft

As written on customers.microsoft.com

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For more information, call us at 800-208-3617

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As written by Ryan Fuller on blogs.office.com

Microsoft Workplace Analytics—a powerful new organizational analytics solution—is now generally available as an add-on to any Office 365 enterprise plan.

According to a recent Forrester report, increasing employee productivity is the number one priority for C-level executives in the next year, with 96 percent of respondents citing it as a critical or high imperative. Workplace Analytics provides unprecedented behavioral insights that can be used to improve productivity, workforce effectiveness and employee engagement.

New insights from Office 365

Workplace Analytics taps into Office 365 email and calendar metadata, including to/from data, subject lines and timestamps, to shine a light on how the organization collaborates and spends time. It turns this digital exhaust—the data that comes naturally from our everyday work—into a set of behavioral metrics that can be used to understand what’s going on in an organization.[/vc_column_text][grve_single_image image="17404"][vc_column_text]Microsoft has enabled Workplace Analytics with built-in privacy and compliance capabilities. Customers own their Office 365 data and decide how to apply insights generated by Workplace Analytics to solve tough business challenges. Workplace Analytics only leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified.

Workplace Analytics was designed with the flexibility to address a broad range of strategic and organizational culture-based initiatives. Let’s take a look at a few ways customers are using Workplace Analytics:

Sales productivity

A sales organization in a Fortune 500 company used Workplace Analytics to identify the collaborative patterns of top performers and then scaled those behaviors to the broader sales organization—resulting in a significant increase in sales. Some of these insights were expected, like the amount of time spent with customers. But others were new, like the size of the person’s internal network, which may be an indicator of the salesperson’s ability to get answers and solve customer questions.

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Manager effectiveness

Freddie Mac used Workplace Analytics to drive a cultural change with managers. In looking at how time-usage metrics are related to engagement and retention, they found that the behaviors of managers were pivotal in determining employee engagement and retention. Behaviors, such as 1:1 manager time, level of leadership exposure given to employees and the degree to which work can be distributed evenly across an organization, are measurable through Workplace Analytics.

Space planning

The collaboration insights from Workplace Analytics were used by an organization to partner with its commercial real estate company, CBRE, to do space planning. They analyzed the metadata attached to employee calendar items to calculate the travel time associated with meetings. They found that as a result of the relocation, each employee reduced their travel time to meetings by 46 percent—resulting in a combined total of 100 hours saved per week across all 1,200 employees involved in the move.

Customized queries

Every organization has unique business questions, which is why we’ve included the ability to create custom queries directly within Workplace Analytics. Data analysts can choose from a unique set of collaboration metrics to explore activities and trends within the business, including time spent in email, time in meetings, after-hours time and network size. Analysts can also create custom queries and filter to aggregated population subsets including regions, roles and functions.

“Workplace Analytics is becoming an essential part of our toolkit,” said Tom Springer, partner at Bain. “It shows us where and how our clients are deploying their scarcest resources: the time, talent and energy of their people. Workplace Analytics consistently yields unique insights into resource allocation, collaboration behaviors and organizational networks. We integrate these insights with broader perspectives on strategy, operating model and results delivery to help our clients organize for maximum productivity.”

Building a digital, data-driven enterprise

At Microsoft, Workplace Analytics has yielded significant insights. “We believe building a true digital, data-driven enterprise requires organizations to empower and connect their people across everything—people, processes, data and systems,” said Kathleen Hogan, chief people officer at Microsoft. “Our HR Business Insights group is using Workplace Analytics across a variety of initiatives—from understanding the behaviors driving increased employee engagement, to identifying the qualities of top-performing managers who are leading Microsoft’s cultural transformation from within. We believe people analytics is a competitive necessity for any HR team.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner css=".vc_custom_1534362068036{padding-top: 20px !important;padding-right: 20px !important;padding-bottom: 20px !important;padding-left: 20px !important;}"][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]

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New in Office 365 security and compliance

As written on blogs.office.com

Recent updates for security and compliance include enhancements to Microsoft Defender, eDiscovery, Advanced Data Governance, Advanced Security Management and expanded support for Windows Information Protection. Read on to learn more about these updates.

Enhancements to threat protection visibility and controls

Office 365 Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Microsoft Defender were designed to keep your organization protected against cyber-attacks while supporting end-user productivity. The Office 365 team continues to enhance both EOP and Defender by offering deeper insights and more flexible controls. This month, we are introducing the following new capabilities:

Threat Protection status report—New reporting for Defender and EOP that adds visibility into malicious emails detected and blocked for your organization. This supplements the recently introduced reports in the Security & Compliance Center for Defender Safe Attachments.

Enhanced quarantine capabilities—Now all emails classified as malware from both EOP and Defender are quarantined. This builds upon the existing quarantine experience by allowing administrators to review and delete emails from quarantine.

New Defender Safe Links Policy features—Four new features build upon the Safe Link policies.

• Per-tenant block list—Provides the administrator the ability to block specific URLs.

• Email wildcarding for domains and handles—Enables you to save time by writing partial domain/handle names.

• Split Safe Links policies—Allows Safe Links policies to be customized for specific user lists in the organization, including groups, individuals and divisions.

• Expanded character limit for URLs—Enables blocking/allowing URLs with longer character lengths.

Additional details on these new features can be found in the Microsoft Tech Community, as well as on the EOP and Defender product pages. EOP is offered across our enterprise E1, E3 and E5 suites. Defender is offered as both a standalone SKU or as part of E5.

New features streamline your compliance process using Office 365

Businesses around the world must be able to keep and protect important information and quickly find what’s relevant to continue to meet legal, business and regulatory compliance requirements. At Microsoft, we know how demanding and complex compliance can be and have recently released several new eDiscovery and Data Governance features in Office 365 to support your compliance needs. These features include:

Optical character recognition in Advanced eDiscovery—Extracts text from image files or objects within the files, significantly reducing the amount of manual remediation work required to analyze image files.

Rights management (RMS) decryption in Office 365 eDiscovery—Automatically decrypts RMS-encrypted email messages at export time when you choose the MSG Export option.

Unified case management—Provides a consistent user interface spanning the eDiscovery capabilities in Office 365, from core to advanced, which helps to reduce potential human errors by streamlining eDiscovery case definition and eliminating several steps in the process.

Visit the Microsoft Tech Community for more details about the new eDiscovery features. Unified case management and RMS decryption are included with Office 365 E3. Optical character recognition is included with Advanced eDiscovery in E5.

Announcing general availability of Supervision capabilities in Office 365 Advanced Data Governance

Many organizations have the need to perform supervision of employee communications. This need stems from internal security and compliance guidelines, or from regulatory bodies such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). In both cases, failure to have a demonstrable supervision process in place could potentially expose organizations to liability or severe penalties.

To address this need, we’ve released the new Supervision feature in Office 365 Advanced Data Governance. Supervision covers not only email communications, but also third-party communications streams, such as Facebook, Twitter, Bloomberg and many more. Visit the Microsoft Tech Community for more details about the general availability of Supervision.

Supervision is part of Office 365 Advanced Data Governance, which is available as part of Office 365 E5 or the Office 365 Advanced Compliance SKU.

Windows Information Protection now supports Office desktop applications

In August, we announced our support of Windows Information Protection (WIP) for Office mobile apps on Windows tablets and phones, to help prevent accidental business data leaks while letting users maintain control over their personal data by designating content as “work” or “personal.” We’re pleased to announce we have expanded support for WIP to include the Office 365 ProPlus desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Skype for Business. This will help provide more comprehensive protection of your business data on Windows 10 devices. To read more about WIP, check out our Microsoft Tech Community blog.

SIEM connector—now available for Office 365 Advanced Security Management

A year ago, we announced a way for you to get greater visibility and control over Office 365 with Advanced Security Management (ASM). Since then, we have added new features to help you better determine shadow IT activity. We also enhanced control over third-party appsconnected to Office 365. After these updates, we started hearing that some of you were looking for a way to export alerts to other systems that are integrated into your existing workflows. Today, we are releasing a solution that supports centralized monitoring of ASM alerts with your security information and event management (SIEM) software. Integrating with an SIEM allows you to better protect Office 365 while maintaining your organization’s security workflow, automate your security procedures and correlate between your cloud-based and on-premises events.

There is no additional cost for an SIEM connector for ASM; you just need to have Office 365 E5 or the ASM add-on. To learn how to setup the ASM SIEM connector, please read “SIEM integration with Office 365 Advanced Security Management.”

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Want more info on cybersecurity? Contact us to learn more about keeping your data protected.

800-208-3617 

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As written on blogs.office.com

Outlook for Mac is adding several highly requested features for Office 365 customers, including the ability to send an email at the time of your choice and request delivery notifications and read receipts. These additions deliver on four of our top 10 requested features, and are designed to help you get more done quickly and stay in control of the day ahead.

A big part of our prioritization of new features and enhancements comes from the votes and feedback we receive from you at our Outlook UserVoice site, and the input we get from our Office Insiders. We thank you all for your feedback and are excited to hear what you think of our new additions!

Here’s a look at what’s new.

Send your emails when you want

The best time to write an email and the best time to send an email may not always align. With our new Send Later feature, you can write an email now and schedule it to be sent automatically at the perfect time. Once you are done drafting your email, click the drop-down next to Send and then select Send Later. Choose the date and time to send the email and the message is saved to your Drafts folder. When the scheduled time comes, the email is automatically sent—you don’t even need to have Outlook or your computer open!

This feature is available to Office Insider Fast users today and coming to Office 365 subscribers in July. For more details, see Can I delay or schedule the delivery of email messages in Outlook 2016 for Mac?

Use read and delivery receipts to track your emails

Sometimes you need to be notified that an important email has been delivered to and read by your recipient. Outlook for Mac now supports both read and delivery receipts. A delivery receipt confirms delivery of your email message to the recipient’s mailbox, but not that the recipient has seen it or read it. A read receipt confirms that your message was opened.

In Outlook for Mac, the message recipient can decline to send read receipts. For more details, see Request a read receipt or delivery notification.

Spend less time writing emails

Sending the same email over and over again? Email templates are great for sending messages that include information that infrequently changes from message to message. Compose and save a message as a template and then reuse it when you want it. New information can be added before the template is sent as an email message. For more details, see Can I create email templates in Outlook 2016 for Mac?

Stay on top of your day by creating calendar events and tasks from emails

Emails contain the important information you need to get things done throughout the day. Often, however, those tasks need to be scheduled as part of your day to get completed on time. You can now drag and drop emails directly to your calendar to reserve that time. The subject of the email becomes the calendar subject, and the body of the email goes in the notes field.

For those of you who are task users, you can do the same thing. Drag the email to your task view to create new items.

Improving the account setup experience

We’ve simplified the Add Account experience in Outlook for Mac. Previously, you needed to know details about what type of account you have (e.g., Office 365 or Exchange, IMAP or POP). Now you can simply enter your email address and Outlook detects your account settings and guides you through the process. And if you’ve signed in to other Office apps before launching Outlook for the first time, you will be asked if you want to add that account automatically. For more details, see Set up Outlook on your Mac.

How do I get all these new improvements?

The Send Later feature is available to Office Insider Fast users today on version 15.36 (170606) and will be available to all Office 365 subscribers in July. The Request a Delivery and Read receipts, email templates, and creating calendar events and tasks from emails additions are available today to all Office 365 subscribers on version 15.35 (170610). The improved account setup experience is available to all Outlook Mac users on version 15.34 (170515).

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How Collaboration Tools Can Turn Your Business Into A Social Enterprise

As written on cio.com

Social networks for business help enterprises collaborate securely across departments, offices and countries. Many available tools give employees a sense of online community and help forge connections between different parts of the business and your customers.

However, some business leaders struggle to understand the benefits of the “social business”. Furthermore, organizations that have made the leap often find that after embracing the technology initially, employees’ enthusiasm soon dies down and only a handful of workers continue to use the technology.

So, how can businesses develop a long-term social business strategy? We spoke to a number of experts to find out.

ROLE-BASED, GOAL-BASED

“Social tools have evolved well beyond Facebook and Twitter, this much we have to accept as a given,” said Adrian Bridgwater, an enterprise IT blogger for a number of B2B sites, including Forbes. ”We now have an opportunity to use socially-driven collaboration tools in new ways to change the way we work. Role-based, goal-based, cloud-based collaboration can now be engineered into the computing fabric that firms now centre their Line of Business architectures around.“

David Terrar,

David Terrar, founder of digital transformation and social business consultancy Agile Elephant, underlined the point, saying that enterprises that don’t embrace these technologies risked become irrelevant.

“I don't care what business you are in, your business model is under threat from a smarter, nimbler competitor with a new idea or a better use of technology. If you don't want to end up like a Kodak, a Blockbuster or your local taxi firm you need to be harnessing the collective know-how and the potential returns from the great ideas of all of your people.”

CUSTOMER SERVICE

According to Computerworld’s 2015 Forecast Study, social networking, alongside predictive analytics, will be one of the most disruptive business technologies over the next three to five years, more so than the Internet of Things and mobile payments. For many organizations, that disruption is already underway.

 

For those businesses that are already reaping the rewards of a social enterprise strategy, it’s not simply about providing employees with the means to interact with each other more effectively. Christian McMahon, CIO at business consultancy three25, said that in future many interactions with customers could be improved by the use of social tools.

“Harnessing social collaboration through your socially enabled cloud infrastructure is a great way to engage with and get rapid response from/to both your internal and external customer base,” said McMahon.

“Social media will soon become the main interaction point for customer service and external communication in less regulated industries, away from just being pointed at traditionally bloated websites with pages of static content and FAQs to wade through. In this more interactive and collaborative mobile world, customers now deserve more dynamic and engaging interaction beyond the traditional call centre approach,” he added.

René Büst, Senior Analyst and Cloud Practice Lead at Crisp Research, said that a cloud infrastructure with social capabilities has the potential to help improve the customer engagement by letting the customer become an integral part of the entire customer life-cycle process. “The customer is empowered to follow his request in real-time and be integrated into the process in real-time, giving him more power, influence and overview. This kind of closer, real-time, collaboration helps to accelerate the overall process to solve issues and challenges faster by working like a team together with the customer,” said Büst.

Furthermore, by becoming an enterprise that relies on social collaboration, you have the opportunity to reduce reliance on other things, like storage and even paper.

“Gone are the days when large attachments need to be sent to hundreds and thousands of employees and consume vast amounts of storage for each individual copy: single points of cloud-based storage enable short messages linking to one copy only… the risk of out-of-date manuals, procedures and processes can be mitigated by similar mechanisms,” said  Daniel Steeves, a business consultant at Beyond Solutions. ”Costs in printing and posting paper contracts and agreements can also be reduced or eliminated – as well as the time lags required – by combining file sharing and e-signature capabilities.”

“With the right collaboration and sharing service, a lot of your storage and data management problems go away,” agreed Dale Vile, Research Director at IT analyst firm Freeform Dynamics. “You know where your data is, you know it is safe and secure, you don’t have to worry about long-term retention, and everything is easily accessible, subject to security policy of course. How much can you say those things in relation to all that data sitting in file shares, on personal hard disks, mobile devices, and so on.”

RIP EMAIL

So, what are the major hurdles faced by organisations striving to become a “social enterprise”? Vile said one of the challenges is weaning users off unofficial and “often insecure” communication tools, and ensuring “that the service you choose delivers the same the level of convenience.”

But even with the perfect collaboration tools in place, encouraging users to change the habit of a lifetime will be a battle, said Alan Mather, former chief executive of the e-delivery team at the UK Government’s Cabinet Office and now Director at Ardea Enterprises Limited.

“How do you get people off email and into collaboration when email is so often the default way to communicate, exchange files, debate the contents of a document, send a version of a document for review and so on.  That latter point is nothing about technology and all about how you make the collaboration space the heart of the where the company does its business - it means the CEO must be active and everyone down from him or her must be as active. It means that if you want the latest version of a document or you want an opinion on a policy or a strategy point, you can only go to that social space to get what you need.”

CULTURE OF SHARING

Forcing employees to use social tools is one way to ensure new technologies are embraced, but ultimately the challenge will be in changing the culture of the organisation.

“The way you do that is with a culture of sharing, working out loud and collaborating across the organisation, underpinned by the accessibility and connectivity of a cloud infrastructure combined with the sort of open, lightweight communication that good social tools or the right enterprise social network can bring,” said Terrar. “You need cloud, social and mobile technology to make that happen effectively, but it only works if you get the culture and leadership right too.”

CIOs and other IT decision makers face plenty of challenges in their pursuit of social enterprise collaboration. Business must understand what they’re trying to achieve before they set off on the journey, and be committed to making cultural changes to the way they work. But the message is clear – collaboration tools are likely to take over your enterprise whether you like it or not, and it’s better to be the leader rather than the follower.

“If you are not presently positioned as a socially aware organisation that offers social collaboration, your customers may force your hand and insist you rapidly change your approach,” said McMahon. “The proliferation of modern devices, always-on mobility and the way your data is consumed proves social collaboration isn’t the ideal, it’s the new norm and you had better be ready.”

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NASCAR’s drive to digitally transform helps fuel a new ‘tech age’ across the sports landscape

By Bill Briggs as written on blogs.microsoft.com

It’s race day. On the 1.99-mile road course, 38 cars roar in a blazing blur of team colors and engine thunder. Midway through the event, a NASCAR official peers into that speedy swirl to find one specific car due for a pit stop.

“Sounds simple, right? It can take a minute,” said John Probst, NASCAR managing director of competition innovation. “Even five to 10 seconds is a long time in our sport. Every second counts.”

Now, there’s a tool to do that task in true NASCAR style – fast. With the race management app, built by NASCAR and Microsoft on Windows 10, race officials can click on a car number and instantly see that driver’s position on the track – or learn when the car got fresh tires or will next stop for fuel. NASCAR officially launched it Sunday for the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway.

The app, introduced in 2016, includes new components like “freeze the field,” which combines video and positioning that helps NASCAR break down live race video and post-race footage to spot when and exactly where cars were located on the track. Officials also can use the app to see – on a single window – how much time the race has been run under green, yellow and red flags; how many cars are in the garage; and whether pit road penalties occurred.

image: https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/06/NASCAR-tech-image-4-683x1024.jpg

NASCAR officials use a tablet to keep the race safe. (Photo by Integrated Talent)

“Running a race requires many people consuming data from many different sources and then coordinating that information into a seamless operation,” Probst said. “Historically, this information and data has been presented in a piecemeal form – little bits of information spread across many monitors or printed on individual sheets of paper.

“With the race management app, we are able to combine all of this information and present it to officials in a logical way. One application, one display,” Probst said.

Within NASCAR, officials are adopting new technologies to make their races fairer and safer – while also leveraging Microsoft tools like SharePoint to move their Super Bowl-sized event from city to city, 38 times a year. And at Hendrick Motorsports, 12-time NASCAR Cup Series champions, engineers are increasingly tapping tech to snip off fractions of seconds from pit stops and lap times.

In fact, decades of innovation within motor sports have helped lead the tech boom now rumbling throughout the larger sports landscape, from soccer to golf to high school football. It is a milestone moment, expert say, as more leagues, teams and competitors apply tools like Azure Machine Learning and Microsoft artificial intelligence solutions to achieve a singular goal: winning.

Intelligent guesses and gut instincts alone don’t cut it any longer on the track or on the field of play. Top performers are capturing and organizing the tremendous reservoir of raw data generated by their races and games – then using tools like predictive analytics to make smarter decisions, said Mike Downey, director of sports technology engineering at Microsoft.

Tech age in sports

“You could describe the current wave of tech transformation as a pivotal moment across all of sports. It’s up there with the Industrial Revolution and the Iron Age,” Downey said. “It’s the tech age in sports. It’s huge, and hugely transformational.”

Microsoft Consulting Services partnered with NASCAR to develop the race management app on Windows 10, with data and video stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The app combines into one screen six data categories – historical data, timing and scoring, pit road officiating, video replay and car positioning.

From the people who officiate the action on the track to those managing everything from the safety vehicles in the Race Control hub, the app is streamlining operations, said Betsy Grider, managing director of technology development at NASCAR.

“When you have incidents on track or big wrecks, it’s high pressure, high stress,” Grider said. “After safety and medical situations are taken care of, you want to get those cars back to racing as soon as possible. Using a master app that allows you to jump in and out of different functions live, that puts everything (that’s happening) on one single pane of glass, it really helps operationally.”

Policing the pits

NASCAR has also integrated Microsoft Surface Dial into the app. The hardware tool is the size of a hockey puck and works with Microsoft Surface Studio and Surface Pro to activate hidden software features, freeing up hands for other tasks. NASCAR race officials are using Surface Dial in the app’s “infraction video” feature, which captures video to monitor pit stops for violations, said Stephen Byrd, NASCAR director of technology integration and development.

“We can now have multiple officials review and scrutinize these videos, using the Dial to play the clip on a granular level, frame by frame, so they can analyze what happened in real time, literally saving us seconds,” Byrd said. “That’s important because we want to be able to issue a penalty before that car (in violation) makes a full, complete lap. Time is of the essence.”

When the race is done, the work really starts. NASCAR is not a light packer. The entire race event –communication and broadcast hubs, cars, computers and camshafts – gets assembled and hauled in tractor-trailers to the next track in the next city for the next race.

image: https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/06/NASCAR-haulers--1024x683.jpg

Haulers lined up at Sonoma Raceway carry the cars, parts, tools and NASCAR equipment from city to city. (Photo by Integrated Talent)

“Just imagine lifting up three square city blocks of Manhattan and trying to move them around the country. The logistical operation compares to what you might see in the Olympics or the Super Bowl. But we’re doing it every weekend,” Grider said.

To pull all of that together, NASCAR employees stay in communication through Microsoft SharePoint, which offers a secure place to store, share, organize and access information from almost any device. (NASCAR is headquartered in Daytona Beach, Florida.) They also use Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-connected service that includes Exchange Online for email, SharePoint Online for collaboration and a suite of Office Web Apps.

‘The tech is staggering’

For NASCAR’s most decorated team, Hendrick Motorsports, technology fuels how crew chiefs and engineers hammer out race strategy, make decisions about the cars and manage crucial race-day communications.

“The technology in this sport now is staggering,” said Taylor Moyer, a race engineer with Hendrick Motorsports. He’s one of three engineers who work on the No. 5 Chevrolet SS driven by Kasey Kahne.

image: https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/06/NASCAR-Taylor-Moyer--500x749.jpg

Hendrick Motorsports engineer Taylor Moyer. (Photo by Integrated Talent)

Three weeks before each race, Moyer and the other engineers begin compiling a large report on the track, the car and other aspects of the looming competition. They upload all their files into Microsoft OneDrive, which allows them to store, share and sync their information to the cloud. Throughout race weekend, as they gather data from Friday practices and Saturday qualifying runs, they continue building that report, Moyer said.

“We live on Microsoft Teams, OneNote and OneDrive. That allows us to have connectivity at all times. It also allows us to have a personal life, which is a huge thing because, even on our days off, we have to be able to communicate with the shop,” Moyer said. “I wake up, have my morning coffee and eggs on the porch, and work on a (race) simulation. I can drop it in OneDrive, it shows up at the shop, and the other engineers have it.

“The whole time we’re at the track, we’re also dumping files in there. And you have that report everywhere – on your phone, on the morning van ride in,” Moyer said. “It allows us to do so much more with the time we have. The only thing you can’t get more of is time.”

Then there’s the race-planning info he shares with Kahne, who carries a Microsoft Surface tablet equipped with OneDrive.

“Drivers get pulled everywhere for different obligations, but all that time he and I are in constant communication,” Moyer said. “When I’m done with my work – race prep for him – I’ll drop it in his OneDrive file. He can be sitting at home with Tanner, his son. When Tanner goes to bed, he can just open it up and there’s my work. It’s so easy.”

The files they share touch on strategy for the upcoming race. They also include data from previous races Kahne ran at that track – or races run there by the other three Hendrick Motorsports drivers: Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Chase Elliott. Items they discuss may include lap times, speed, tire pressures and temperatures, wear on the vehicle, plus previous driver comments on steering, throttle and braking.

After Kahne reads and assesses that info, he often chats with Moyer via the flexible, chat-based workspaces within Microsoft Teams.

image: https://mscorpmedia.azureedge.net/mscorpmedia/2017/06/Kasey-Kahne-1-683x1024.jpg

NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne at Sonoma Raceway. (Photo by Integrated Talent)

“Taylor really feeds me a majority of the information that I’m looking for each week – our plan and how we can best attack the race weekend,” Kahne said. “We’re looking back at prior races at that track, what we did to the car to make it go fast and how to use some of those items again.

“It really gives me a head start going into a race weekend. Then, I can keep track of it all weekend long (via OneDrive) and know exactly what the guys are doing to be prepared and set for the race on Sunday.”

On race day, Moyer sits atop the pit box and uses Teams as a digital communications hub amid the roaring engines and frantic competition. For example, as Kahne is driving down pit road, Moyer and the team’s fueler have a quick fueling decision to make—one that could win the race. On their screens, they read fuel consumption data and chat about the fuel’s weight, its volume and the car’s speed – a precise relationship. When Kahne stops his No. 5 car, the fueler pumps in a precise amount of fuel and Kahne is quickly back on the track.

But in that frantic moment, the technology shaved precious seconds off the decision and the pit stop.

“If I can get the data out of the race car faster, I can make a decision faster,” Moyer said. “I absolutely wouldn’t be able to do my job without these tools.”

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By Mark Kashman as written on blogs.office.com

During last month’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled SharePoint communication sites—beautiful, dynamic sites that let you reach a broad internal audience, and that look great on the web, in the SharePoint mobile app, on PC and on Mac. Today, we’re excited to announce that communication sites are now rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers, followed by full worldwide rollout to Office 365 customers in the coming months.

Create a beautiful communication site in seconds

Communication sites are perfect for internal cross-company campaigns, weekly and monthly reports or status updates, product launches, events and more. To help you jumpstart getting your message out fast, communication sites provide configurable templates for the sites and pages within. When you click Create site from the SharePoint home in Office 365, you have a choice of three initial site designs:

• Topic—Select the Topic design when you have a lot of information to share, such as news, events and other content.

• Showcase—Use the Showcase design to feature a product, team or event using photos or images.

• Blank—Start with a blank site and make your design come to life quickly and easily.

Communication site designs (from left to right): Topic, Showcase and Blank.

And it is easy to tell your story. Once your new site is created, simply drag-and-drop to reorganize web parts on the page to bring your use cases and scenarios to life. News and pages allow for multi-column layouts to represent your message in a meaningful, intuitive fashion.

Learn how to create a communication site in Office 365, add a page and work with column layouts.

Share your plans and updates in engaging, interactive ways

Communication sites allow people to create and share recurring updates beyond email. When you create a page on a communication site, you can embed documents and video, and dynamically pull in real-time data from across Office 365, including documents from SharePoint, Power BI reports, Microsoft Stream videos and Yammer discussions. The resulting page is a rich and dynamic communication. And the page persists on the site, so people can refer to it easily, even as the membership of your team changes, so new members can more easily get up to speed.

The new capabilities for the rich section layouts and new web parts can be utilized on SharePoint team sites as well.

Consume, create and connect from your mobile device via the SharePoint apps

It’s easy to access, engage with and create content for communication sites from any device. The full site, pages, news, navigation, search and more are natively viewable, functional and engaging. Read a page, create a news article, engage in a Yammer conversation—all in the context of the site—from within the SharePoint mobile app experience.

You can download the SharePoint mobiles apps for iOS and Android today, and the new features will be available in the coming weeks. Learn more about the SharePoint mobile app for iOS, SharePoint mobile app for Android and SharePoint app for Windows 10 Mobile.

Communication sites help further refine and enhance your message

Beyond what we shared during the SharePoint Virtual Summit, communication sites have additional capabilities to further refine and enhance your message.

Make your home page and sub-pages look great

• Full-width layouts—The Hero and Image web parts can be placed in a section layout that spans the page from left to right, giving you ways to emphasize your most essential information.

• Enhanced title region with custom header image—Visually represent your home page, news and subpages with a compelling header graphic and title. You control what portion of the image is the most important, so it looks great, and as intended, across web and mobile experiences.

Continue the discussion in context to ensure reach, retention and engagement

• Comments on pages—Each news article and page can have its own set of comments. It is possible to use the Yammer web part for broad discussion scenarios as well as targeted responses to engage your viewers on the sole message and content on the page—all keeping within the context of the page.

• Share news via email—When you share news via email from a communication site, it’s not just a blue link; it’s a visual, informative preview that adds context to both the email and the news article itself. Within the email, the recipient(s) will see a thumbnail, title, description and an optional message from the sender.

Dynamically pull in and display data, documents and information via web part improvements

• Power BI and Microsoft Stream—Bring in interactive reports using the Power BI web part, and embed single videos or full channels from Microsoft Stream—the single destination within Office 365 for your cross-company video management. Both Power BI and Microsoft Stream are now generally available.

• GIF support—When you add an Image web part into a news article or page, you can now include animated GIFs in your layout.

• New “See all” pages—When there is more content than can be shown within the first view the Highlighted content and Site activity web parts, you can click See all to go to a full-page experience to see all the content and activity.

• Updated News web part—Showcase your news using multiple layouts to highlight what’s important with greater flexibility. You can use the default Top story layout, view news as a list or side-by-side.

Learn more about using web parts on pages and news, which highlights all web parts available in SharePoint Online.

Mark your calendars

Join us for one or more of our events in the coming days and weeks to share and explore the value of communication sites.

• SharePoint communication sites AMA—On Wednesday, June 28, 2017 from 9–10 a.m. PDT, bring your questions and feedback to the SharePoint communication sites AMA within this dedicated SharePoint community space of the Microsoft Tech Community for SharePoint. We’re inviting our deepest business and technical subject matter experts for an active, informative hour—driven by YOU!

• Jeff Teper takes over @SharePoint—On Tuesday, July 10, 2017 from 9:30–10:30 a.m. PDT, Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for SharePoint, OneDrive and Office, will take over the @SharePoint Twitter handle. He’ll tackle your questions and feedback both with written responses and video snippets as only he can—no tweet left behind!

• LIVE customer + MVPs panel webinar—On Wednesday, July 13, 2017 at 8 a.m. PDT, join in to hear how one of our customers, Shire, successfully planned and implemented their new digital workspace—inclusive of communication sites. You will hear both from Shire employees and Office 365 MVPs. Register today.

• On-demand webcast—On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, Farren Roper and I present the “SharePoint: Inform and engage your employees” business webcast. Be the first to be notified when it’s available: sign up today. And in advance, read the new, related eBook, “4 secrets to a connected workplace.”

Throughout the lifecycle of your projects, launches and internal campaigns, let the SharePoint intranet help you move seamlessly from concept to final product. The powerful, dynamic SharePoint user experiences let you clearly communicate your message throughout your company.

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