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]
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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Get started with Power BI
Microsoft Power BI helps you stay up to date with the information that matters to you. With Power BI, dashboards help you keep a finger on the pulse of your business. Your dashboards display tiles that you can click to explore further with reports. Connect to multiple datasets to bring all of the relevant data together in one place.
If you have important data in Excel or CSV files, you can create a Power BI dashboard to stay informed anywhere and share insights with others. Do you have a subscription to a SaaS application like Salesforce? Get a head start by connecting to Salesforce to automatically create a dashboard from that data, or check out all the other SaaS apps you can connect to. If you are part of an organization, see if any organizational content packs have been published for you.
If you're in your workspace, select Get Data at the bottom of the left navigation pane.
Select Files.
Select Local File, browse to the file on your computer, and choose Open.
Power BI uploads the CSV file and adds it as a new dataset (the yellow asterisk indicates a new item). Since we did not already have a dashboard, Power BI also created a new dashboard for us. In the left navigation pane, the new dashboard is listed under the Dashboards heading, and the new dataset appears under the Datasets heading.
Step 2: Start exploring your dataset
Now that you have connected to data, explore to find insights. When you've found something you want to monitor, you can create a dashboard to keep up-to-date with changes.
Select the dataset image on the dashboard to explore the data you just connected to or, under the Datasets heading, right-click the dataset name and select Explore.
In the Fields list on the right side of the page, select fields to build a visualization. Select the checkbox beside Gross Sales and Date.
Power BI analyzes the data and creates a visual. If you selected Date first, you'll see a table. If you selected Gross Sales first, you'll see a chart. Switch to a different way of displaying your data. Try changing to a line chart by selecting the line chart option.
When you have a visualization you want on your dashboard, hover over the visualization and select the Pin icon. When you pin this visualization, it will be stored on your dashboard so you can track the latest value at a glance.
Because this is a new report, you need to save it before you can pin a visualization from it to the dashboard. Give your report a name (e.g., Sales Over Time) and select Save and Continue.
The new report appears in the navigation pane under the Reports heading.
Pin the tile to an existing dashboard or to a new dashboard.
Existing dashboard: select the name of the dashboard from the dropdown.
New dashboard: type the name of the new dashboard.
Select Pin.
A Success message (near the top right corner) lets you know the visualization was added, as a tile, to your dashboard.
New offers make it easier for small and midsized businesses to move to Office 365
Microsoft recently announced new FastTrak offers to make it easier for small to midsized businesses (SMBs) to move to Office 365 and experience the ability for your employees to access team files from anywhere, collaborate in real-time from any device and get enterprise-grade security that works as hard for you as for the largest organizations.
Customers with 50 to 149 seats of Office 365 enterprise and small business plans can take advantage of the customer success service Microsoft FastTrack. Previously available only to customers with 150 seats or more, FastTrack provides resources to ensure you get the most business value from your investment.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Managed Solution has the experience and a team of IT experts to help companies small and large get up and running with the right technology. In addition to extending FastTrack to more customers, Microsoft is expanding the FY16 Adoption Offer to include Office 365 small business plans and adding payouts for customer deployments of 50–149 seats. Contact us 800-307-0296 to see if you qualify.
Gartner recently analyzed cloud email usage among public companies of different sizes, industries and geographies to see how Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Work are faring. The report states that more companies use Office 365 than Google Apps.
5 Reasons to Break Up with Your Google Apps & Move On To Office 365
Valentine's Day is a time for love - and also a time for break ups.
Here are five reasons people are dumping Google Apps and switching to Office 365.
Passwords.
Google's approach to logging in and managing various e-mail identities is complicated. To make matters worse, employees often have trouble telling whether they're logged in to the company's virtual e-mail system or their own personal Gmail account. Also, be prepared to be bombarded by ad-supported content. Text ads are Google's main business, so you're pretty much always looking at them. Some may be relevant, but many businesses will be wary about opening their private company e-mails to marketers, even if anonymously.
Permissions in Projects/Scheduling.
Time and time again, this has been difficult to manage with Google Apps. Usually, it requires a third party plug-in. If your company is starting a new project that needs to be shared ASAP, good luck waiting for all those plug-ins to download.
Google Docs.
Google Docs will not replace Microsoft Word when it comes to producing slick, professional looking documents. It can be difficult to format a document in Google Docs, which has very limited formatting capabilities. Often times, this means you have to format the document in word, and then upload it to Google Drive as a Word document. So why not skip the extra steps?
Google Presentations and Connectivity.
Think your work is automatically safe in Google Drive? Think again. Connectivity can still be an issue, a scary prospect when Google Presentations freezes up in the middle of saving a document.Google Presentations does not have the same level of features as PowerPoint so design features are limited. This means if you want to really impress your boss with your next big presentation, you won't find the tools and features you need with Google Presentations. The good news is PowerPoint has endless features and options to help you nail that proposal.
Google Spreadsheets.
Data entry in Google Spreadsheets can be buggy with lines disappearing without warning. Functionality can be complicated. Even simple formatting can be difficult. Fans of Microsoft Excel, prepare to be disappointed."I once worked on a project at work for about 4 hours, inputting information and employee names into a Google Spreadsheet. I shared it with my boss after telling her I had finished the project. When I went into work the next day, more than half of the information I had put in got deleted through no fault of my own - meaning I had to redo more than half of the project and waste about half of my day (thanks Google)."
Breakups aren't always easy, but sometimes you just have to let them go (we're looking at you Google Apps).. eat chocolate and try
With the new Get & Transform capabilities in Excel 2016, you can now import, transform and combine data from different sources—thanks to the integrated Power Query technology in Excel. Today we are going to focus on one of the most useful capabilities that Get & Transform offers—the ability to unpivot to transform ANY table in your workbook to make it ready for powerful analysis using PivotTables and PivotCharts.
Transform a static table into a PivotTable ready for deep analysis.
Let’s start with a common scenario. You have an Excel workbook that is dedicated for manual data entry to record the hours you put in for each relevant project:
But analyzing this data is not easy and sometimes you wish you could easily create charts on this data, or even better—PivotCharts.
Here is a common, yet challenging scenario—challenging, because it would take a lot of effort to get to the point you can gain insights from this data in the current format. Fortunately, through the new Get & Transform section in the Data tab of Excel 2016, the challenge is over.
Simply select any cell inside an existing table or range and in the Get & Transform section, click From Table.
You will see a preview of your data inside the Query Editor window. From this window, you can start transforming your data in powerful, yet simple ways. Each change you make is recorded as a transformation step that is saved with your workbook. All the steps are kept as a sequence that can be performed again and again each time you refresh your data.
In the Query Editor, you will usually need the help of the Unpivot transformation to change your table into a format that can be used by PivotTable.
In the example below, I can select the first column that includes project names and click Unpivot Other Columns to transform my data from columns of Project Name / 2010 / 2011 / 2012… to the desired column structure of Project / Year / Duration.
And here are the results in the Query Editor:
I can now rename the columns to Project, Year and Duration inside the Query Editor and then load the data into a PivotTable or PivotChart.
Learn More:
If you are familiar with the Unpivot functionality and want to test your skills, read this post. Even simple tables such as a class schedule may require some cunning approach.
The most common scenario includes nested tables with hierarchical date information such as years, quarters and months. Read here how to transform these tables.
And if you wish to apply your magic on ANY nested table, read this post that will first show you how to unpivot three levels of nested rows and columns. It is so simple.
On many occasions your data contains comma-separated values, like a table of events in which all participants are listed on a single column. You can learn here how to split such data and unpivot it.
Finally, you can learn here how to transform and unpivot all these challenging tables in Power BI Desktop, and build amazing dashboards in Power BI.
to show this visualization on your dashboard too.
to return to your dashboard where you'll see the new tile.
