Receive guidance and considerations you need to make regarding the secure use and implementation of Azure cloud technology
Since its launch in 2010, Microsoft Azure has gained rapid adoption from organizations of all sizes around the world, spanning many industries. The users of Azure benefit from agility, reduced costs and complexity, limitless scale, and innovation made possible by cloud computing.
For organizations in regulated industries, such as healthcare, where laws regulate protected health information (PHI), the need to understand how cloud adoption affects their privacy, security, and regulatory compliance posture is paramount. These organizations should seek deeper understanding and guidance in solution design and cloud deployment operations.
Professional learning community groups in Office 365 Education
A professional learning community, or PLC, is a group of educators who meet regularly to share expertise and work collaboratively to improve teaching skills and the academic performance of students. Teachers around the world have started using Office 365 Groups to make collaboration within a PLC a lot simpler and more streamlined. PLC groups are typically formed around interest areas (e.g., 9th grade math), grade levels (e.g., 10th grade teachers) or across subjects (e.g., science teachers).
Here are some barriers to engagement with PLCs today that Office 365 Groups is addressing:
•Teachers can be isolated, time is severely limited and collaboration is difficult.
•Professional collaboration tools are disconnected and don’t always support meaningful, sustained collaboration.
•A challenge for many PLCs is extending the work and relationships in the times and spaces between physically coming together.
•It can be difficult for new teachers to ramp up.
•Information is often stored in personal spaces as opposed to one common place that can benefit others.
•New members need to better understand the journey, story, exploration and history of a PLC, its activities and areas of inquiry.
As part of our April announcement, we mentioned how we are going to further improve our experience for PLCs. Today, we are excited to announce the PLC Groups Preview—tailored to meet the needs of teachers and overcome the above mentioned barriers to engagement today.
The new Office 365 PLC groups include one place to collaborate effectively in a community of practice. Each group comes with a:
•Inbox for group email communication, including Connector for connecting your group to Twitter and following topics or Twitter handles that interest your PLC group.
•Calendar for scheduling group events.
•Document library for storing and working on group files and folders.
•OneNote notebook for taking project and meeting notes.
•Planner for organizing and assigning tasks and getting updates on project progress.
PLC groups are also available on all your mobile devices—both Outlook Groups and OneNote have mobile apps. This helps you keep track of your PLC conversations and PLC notebooks, making it easy to share relevant resources with your groups on the go.
A look at how one district implemented PLC groups
For an in-depth look at how Omaha Public Schools is using Office 365 Groups for their PLCs to streamline collaboration, read their full case study on the Customer Stories page and then watch this video:
Administrators at Omaha Public Schools developed some guidance for their staff on how to do PLCs in their district:
Here’s what Omaha Public Schools staff members have to say about their experience with PLC groups:
“Looking at what Omaha Public Schools’ needs are around professional learning, it was important to build around a platform that was consistent with what our teachers and staff use on a daily basis.”
—Rob Dickson, executive director of Information Management Services for Omaha Public Schools
I love the fact that I can create sections, that I can create pages within the sections, and I can upload anything I want, or do a quick snip from a page and throw it in there. Everyone knows the format, so we’re not trying to figure out somebody else’s way of thinking.”
—Laura Wray, 4th grade teacher at Wakonda Elementary School
“Using our PLC groups, everything is templated out, so you just add to them and it pops up in their Office 365 account and they’re rolling the next day…There’s so much asked of teachers. They can go home at night and say, OK, here’s an activity we did today and it really helped with that comprehension strand, and I want to make sure my teammates get that.”
—Rebecca Chambers, instructional technology coach
Office 365 Groups—integrated to support PLCs
Here is an example of how Office 365 Groups for PLCs integrates Outlook, OneNote and a SharePoint library:
In Outlook on the web, a faculty member chooses the PLC template to create a PLC group.
The PLC group collaborates, shares lesson plans and stores student data all in a shared group OneNote notebook.
The PLC group can store PLC reference material in the group’s document library.
For more information about upcoming improvements to Office 365 Groups for Education, please visit the Office 365 Education Roadmap.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
Habitat for Humanity of Omaha builds about 45 homes a year for families living in substandard housing, and it’s growing steadily in donations, volunteers, output and programming. Yet its old patchwork of overstuffed shared directories, reliance on spendy outside vendors and trouble managing three locations limited growth and monopolized the budget.
Something had to change—and quickly—to keep up with the organization’s expansion. Through the cloud-based application suite, the community-building nonprofit can now
co-edit files without any hiccups,
work from anywhere,
save time and trouble with powerful cloud-based tools,
accomplish more,
streamline tedious tasks, and
save money on tech support.
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More homes for families thanks to in-house technology
Taking control for less money
Office 365 grants Lynn easy control over administrator features, such as creating and deleting mailboxes and delineating access to certain files and programs—steps that used to require going through a vendor, paying to put in tickets and waiting hours for a call back.
These changes make work easier for employees, but more importantly, they create a wider ripple effect, he says. “Habitat for Humanity of Omaha is making a huge difference in our community, and one or two additional families are able to purchase interest-free new homes each year because of the partnership with Microsoft.”
Organizing effortlessly in the cloud
Before they started using Office 365 Nonprofit, employees accessed a shared directory on a server. “It was chaos,” Lynn says: Only one staffer could open a file at a time, annotating changes took special steps and documents would disappear—requiring employees to manually poke around for MIA folders.
Today, the team collaborates with SharePoint and OneDrive, which make it simple for multiple users to edit at once. And those phantom documents? They’re a thing of the past. “I have much better control now,” he says.
Staying productive out of the office
Habitat for Humanity of Omaha is just one of more than 1,400 affiliates nationwide, so employees often travel to conferences. But setbacks from business trips are especially problematic when they delay settling a family in a new home. With mobile applications and cloud storage, though, Habitat for Humanity travelers can work just as efficiently as if they were at their desks.
“When I work remotely, I’m on the same files and programs as if I were here in the office,” Lynn says. “It beats coming back to hundreds of unread emails!”
Saving time with smart spreadsheets
The nonprofit has always been Excel-driven, with employees using spreadsheets to track their daily work, monitor budgets and add links or shortcuts to speed up entering data. The problem? Files were moved or altered, links were broken and multiple versions of the same document made work confusing.
“With OneDrive and SharePoint, we’re able to avoid duplicate copies, and I can lock down who can see them in view-only and who has total rights,” Lynn says. “The efficiencies gained from better collaboration and process improvement saves us thousands.”
Onboarding new employees—fast
Entering data in the cloud also made it easier to bring new employees up to speed, says Oscar Duran, Habitat for Humanity of Omaha’s program director. Before, new staff accessed spreadsheets on personal desktops or in emails, and they didn’t have a uniform system for coding projects. Discrepancies added extra work for Duran because he had to sift through mountains of data to find what he needed.
Now, the team uses SharePoint’s Lists feature to enter and codify information. “It works as a centralized database,” he says. “It also gave us the opportunity to institutionalize the terminology we use, so that as new staff comes in and out, they’re accessing databases and changing statuses in the same way.”
Accessing files in a flash
OneNote’s powerful search function has solved an age-old problem for the nonprofit: “People say, ‘I remember working on that but I can’t remember which spreadsheet it was,’” Lynn says.
No longer. He puts every document he touches, including PDFs, into OneNote and relies on it every day (“It is my brain!” he jokes), knowing he can quickly find and access whatever he needs. Lynn says he’s watched his own productivity skyrocket, now that he doesn’t have to sink hours into painstakingly searching through servers.
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Running better meetings
OneNote has revolutionized meeting notes, Lynn says. A designated note-taker types minutes in a shared document so everyone can add their own thoughts later, freeing up everyone else to focus on contributing to the meeting.
Staff also use Lync’s desktop-sharing ability to stay connected without leaving the office. Employees can see a colleague’s computer screen during a virtual meeting, and the feature helps IT staff troubleshoot a glitchy program remotely. “It’s given me remote access, which is much more efficient,” Lynn says.
Maddie started her first day at Managed Solution on Wednesday, May 18, 2016. Maddie was born and raised in Poway, in the north county of San Diego, where she has lived her whole life. Maddie just finished her first year at Baylor University in Waco, TX where she is studying business in Baylor's Professional Selling program. This is her first internship in a corporate business setting, so she is learning a lot already!
At school, Maddie is heavily involved in her sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, where she holds many leadership positions. Back home in San Diego, she loves to run, hike, and be outdoors. In fact, she just ran her first half marathon in March and hopes to run another one in Dallas this coming fall. This summer, she also holds another part-time position at San Diego Bike and Kayak Tours in La Jolla as a sales representative.
Maddie has two dogs at home named Leah and Ginger, and hopes to get a bunny in the fall after moving into her new apartment in Texas. We are so excited to have Maddie as part of the Managed Solution team!
Educators, increase collaboration and professional development with new Office 365 Education updates
As part of Microsoft’s Education announcement in April, we announced new experiences and updates to Office 365 Education coming this summer that will make it easier for teachers to manage their classroom and collaborate with peers, and for them or their IT administrators to set it all up. As part of this announcement, we mentioned there’d be even more updates coming this summer! We’re thrilled to share these with you today—all are teacher inspired and student focused.
Today, we are announcing enhanced educator collaboration with PLC groups, better content sharing with Docs.com, easier formative assessments with Microsoft Forms and additional Learning Management System (LMS) and Student Information System (SIS) partners with OneNote Class Notebook.
All educators have access to these new updates through Office 365 Education, which is totally free for teachers and students when you go to office.com/teacher.
Educator collaboration with PLC groups
Aside from getting started with the technology, we know there can be some barriers to collaborating and sharing knowledge between teachers:
•Teachers can be isolated, time is severely limited and collaboration is difficult.
•Professional collaboration tools are disconnected and don’t always support meaningful, sustained collaboration.
•Information is often stored in the personal files of educators, making it difficult for new teachers to ramp up.
To foster collaboration, educators look to professional learning communities (PLCs), where groups of educators can meet regularly to share expertise and work collaboratively to improve teaching skills and the academic performance of students. In April, we announced how we were going to further improve our experience for PLCs by customizing Office 365 Groups to fit this PLC model even more easily.
Today, we are excited to announce the PLC Groups Preview—tailored to meet educator needs and overcome barriers to engagement. Office 365 Education users who are faculty can now create PLC groups, similar to any other Office 365 group, and access shared conversation spaces, file space, OneNote notebooks and calendars. PLC groups also integrate directly with Microsoft Planner, released in general availability with Office 365 earlier this month. Here is an example of how one of our early adopters, Omaha Public Schools, is using PLC groups with Office 365 Education:
Interested in trying the PLC Groups Preview this summer? Office 365 Education customers can sign up here and request to be added to the preview. Read more about PLC groups in this blog post.
Docs.com fosters knowledge and content sharing
We understand another barrier for teachers is knowledge and content sharing within a PLC or across the globe. Teachers are constantly searching for new lessons and their students want to share their work with parents and the world.
Docs.com is the easiest way to create a visually appealing online portfolio that can include OneNote notebooks, Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint slide decks, interactive Sways, PDFs and a host of web content. Docs.com retains all the rich formatting, animations and formulas of your Office documents and can be easily shared with your school and the world. We have been gathering feedback from thousands of amazing educators and students around the globe to ensure that the experience can meet their needs.
We heard from teachers about how some of their content is not quite ready to be shared outside of their school or district, many of which have Office 365 Education as a collaborative platform. Keeping things a little more private sometimes makes students and teachers feel safer about distributing their work. Because of this, today we are announcing the Organization Visibility feature—giving you more granular control over who can see your class content. With Organization Visibility, only people who sign in with an Office 365 work or school account from the same organization (i.e., school or district) can view your content.
Read more about Docs.com in this blog post.
Formative assessment gets easier with Microsoft Forms
Along with collaborating with other educators, we know that most educators’ time is spent in the classroom with the students. Microsoft Forms is the result of direct feedback from educators that they want to have a quizzing function with Office 365 Education. Educators told us they need an easy way to assess student progress on an on-going basis, an assessment solution that will save them time, help differentiate instruction for all students and provide quiz takers with real-time personalized feedback.
Since we announced Microsoft Forms in April, we have added two new features! The first is auto-grading, meaning teachers don’t need to download an add-in or do any complicated workarounds to do grading. The second is real-time, personalized feedback, which allows teachers to provide feedback to students for each answer and question.
Office 365 now works with more of the technology you already use
Since we launched the original Class Notebook add-in assignment and grade integration with Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Information Systems (SIS) and gradebooks, we’ve had many excited educators and schools try it out. We’ve also heard more and more teachers ask for Class Notebook integration with other systems they use. We’ve been busy working with partner companies from around the world over the last couple of months, and today we are announcing more than 35 partners who have committed to working with OneNote and Office 365 Education, with currently over 20 implemented and many more coming soon.
Chula Vista Elementary School District is a customer story that demonstrates how we are working with solutions that educators already use, featuring Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft partner Edmodo.
Getting ready for next school year
To continue to deliver the best products for educators this next school year, we openly ask for your feedback via our UserVoice site. Additionally, we have added a new Office 365 Education public roadmap and blog, so you will soon see new features in our products based on your feedback. Stay tuned for more exciting updates coming over the summer and into next school year.
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Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft agree to remove hate speech across the EU
Facebook, Twitter, Google’s YouTube, Microsoft as well as the European Commission unveiled a new code of conduct to remove hate speech according to community guidelines in less than 24 hours across these social media platforms. The EU has ramped up efforts leading to this code of conduct following the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels and Paris.
ISIS has been successfully using social media to recruit fighters over the past few years. In addition to that, the European economic recession has fostered far-right parties, leading to more online antisemitism and xenophobia.
Tech companies probably don’t want to be held responsible for hate speech and are now taking a strong stance against hate speech. This is surprising as many social networks have promoted free expression and have refused to delete content or accounts in the past (except when it comes to copyrighted material).
But it’s been a slow and steady change. Twitter has already suspended 125,000 accounts related to ISIS since mid-2015. Facebook already agreed to work with the German government against hateful speech back in September 2015. Google and Twitter later joined Facebook and the German government in December 2015. Now, four tech companies are making a formal pledge at the European level against hate speech.
“The recent terror attacks have reminded us of the urgent need to address illegal online hate speech,” Vĕra Jourová, EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, wrote in the European Commission press release. “Social media is unfortunately one of the tools that terrorist groups use to radicalise young people and racist use to spread violence and hatred. This agreement is an important step forward to ensure that the internet remains a place of free and democratic expression, where European values and laws are respected.”
Tech companies will have to find the right balance between freedom of expression and hateful content. Based on the code of conduct, they’ll have dedicated teams reviewing flagged items (poor employees who will have to review awful things every day).
Tech companies will also educate their users and tell them that it’s forbidden to post hateful content. They’ll cooperate with each other to share best practice. They’ll encourage flagging of hateful content and they’ll promote counter speech against hateful rhetoric.
It’s good to see that this issue got escalated and the European Commission was able to come up with a code of conduct quite quickly. Instead of making tech companies deal with every single European country, they can agree on rules for the EU as a whole.
Similarly, it’s encouraging to see tech companies working together on a sensitive issue like this one. While it’s a good starting point, there will be new social platforms in the future, and I hope other tech companies will join this code of conduct in the future.
Last year, Managed Solution supported Red Nose Day by wearing these lovely red noses, as well as donating to the cause. This year you can show your support by donating tonight on the TV show, buying and wearing Red Noses, and by participating in fundraising activities organized through groups and associations. Want to learn more about how to get involved? Check out how to participate in Red Nose Day here>>
Red Nose Day is a campaign dedicated to raising money for children and young people living in poverty by simply having fun and making people laugh. People across the country have come together to have fun and raise funds and awareness.
Money raised during the Red Nose Day campaign goes to the Red Nose Day Fund, which then distributes grants to charities that benefit children and young people in the US and some of the poorest communities in the world.
Managed Solution is proud to support the Red Nose Day Fund, and we look forward to another day filled with laughs, red noses, and helping children.
Managed Solution demonstrates its commitment to people through contributions, charitable sponsorships and employee volunteer programs in the communities where we work and live. To learn more about Managed Solution’s charitable sponsorships, visit our community page.
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Using ChronoZoom to build a comprehensive timeline of climate change in the cloud
A professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explores the history of climate change in depth in his graduate-level Earth System Science class. To help students visualize events through the ages, he is developing a comprehensive history of climate change by using ChronoZoom, an open-source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything.
Building a historical view of climate change
Each year, Jeff Dozier, professor of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, teaches a course in Earth System Science to between 80 and 100 incoming graduate students. Among the issues he teaches: climate record and how the Earth’s climate has changed through the ages—and what drivers are behind those changes.
Covering millions of years’ worth of warming trends within a class term is a challenge; managing the massive volumes of data, charts, videos, illustrations, and other support materials is even more daunting. Dozier needed a way to pull together his materials into an accessible—and manageable—manner.
He found the solution in the award-winning ChronoZoom tool.
ChronoZoom allows users to navigate through "time," beginning with the Big Bang up until present day events. Users can zoom in rapidly from one time period to another, moving through history as quickly or slowly as they desire. In 2013, a third-party authoring tool was built into ChronoZoom, enabling the academic community to share information via data, tours, and insights, so it can be easily visualized and navigated through Deep Zoom functionality.
Visual aids can have a particularly powerful impact when discussing climate change. Dozier is developing a history of the Earth that illustrates changes in climate from the beginning of the planet through modern day. The source materials include images, diagrams, graphs, and time-lapse movies that illustrate changes in the environment. Dozier plans to use the timeline as a teaching aid in his Earth System Science class.
“ChronoZoom has been easy to master and use,” Dozier notes. “You don’t need any sort of client-side application except a browser. All the data is stored on someone else’s machine. The processing is done in the cloud [through Windows Azure], not on your own computer. And the only thing that really shows up on your own computer is the results.” Moreover, thanks to the power of Windows Azure, the tool has the flexibility to scale up and down, enabling users to zoom in on a particular segment in time or zoom out to review climate change from the beginning of recorded history through today. Plus, content developers can share their presentations or timelines with others by simply sharing a link or posting it to a social media site.
Make your mark on history
ChronoZoom has already been used to illustrate the history of the Earth and explore the impact of climate change on the planet through the ages. There are many unexplored possibilities, however. The tool scales up and down, meaning any project can benefit—whether it’s the history of the world or just a review of the last few weeks. Dozier is hopeful others will use ChronoZoom to tell their stories by uploading their own data, images, and text to the cloud and using those materials in the classroom.
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