5 project management tools that save time, money and energy
Steering a project through the stressed and stressful waters of an always-moving organization can be a daunting proposition. These days, the average office worker is burdened by an untold number of deadlines, meetings, emails and tasks—and that means they probably don’t have the time or headspace to dedicate their full talents to you and your project. Luckily, you can help make things easier. To better ensure project success—whether what you’re making is for a client or an internal stakeholder—check out these five project management tools that save time, money and energy.
Gantt charts and scrum boards
In an era of infinite content—armadas of words constantly battling for our limited attention—a simple visual can be refreshing and highly effective. Gantt charts use basic horizontal bars to display project phases and progress. With a quick glance, your teammates will be able to see what work is currently getting done (or at least what work should be getting done) and when their contributions will be needed. They’ll also be able to see how much time each phase is expected to take.
Scrum boards function in a similar manner and work great for projects that are on a less rigid timeline and that involve multiple teams. The board displays different project phases—planning, execution, etc.—and markers for each team. As they complete phases and make progress, teams can move their markers across the board. This allows all involved to see the bigger picture and their place within it.
Task assignments
It’s easy to agree to do something, much harder to remember to do it. Especially when every stray message seems to come with a new request. That’s why an online tool for task assignments is so valuable. Those responsible for completing a portion of the project—whether that means designing a logo or crunching the final numbers—can log in and easily see exactly what they need to do. Depending on their account settings, they’ll also receive email notifications about looming deadlines.
On the flipside, project managers can keep tabs on their team and make sure all tasks are being completed on time without having to scroll through long email chains. This helps avoid costly delays and unnecessary frustrations.
Resource allocation
In an agency environment, resource allocation is key. Project managers need an effective tool to schedule and track hours for every member of their team in order to prevent overbooking, missed deadlines and unhappy clients. But this manner of organization need not be limited to the “creative” world. Wouldn’t it be helpful, even in a corporate office, to have a clear picture of team members’ availability?
Ask your team upfront to estimate—to whatever extent is possible—their availability through the course of the project. Have them mark down any days they’ll be out on vacation, days they won’t be able to put their heads down and work due to meetings, and days they have other deadlines. If you have a sense of hourly availability, you’ll be able to build realistic timelines. An online resource allocation tool will make it easy for you and your teammates to track actual hours against estimates and adjust accordingly, allowing for smoother future workflows.
Feedback tools
Giving feedback means different things to different people—some offer rigid and prescriptive edit requests, others vague feelings and reactions. Sometimes different stakeholders will present conflicting opinions. All of this makes it difficult for the person receiving the feedback to know how to proceed. Who are they supposed to listen to?
Feedback tools allow stakeholders to vote on and rank different versions of deliverables, making it easier for a group to provide cohesive direction in a fair manner. If a certain individual’s opinion should carry more weight—perhaps they boast significant relevant expertise—you can adjust their vote to count as two.
Out-of-the-box reports
Progress reports and post-mortems are crucial parts of any project—and they don’t need to be a time suck. Rather than spend valuable hours creating a custom report, choose an out-of-the-box option. You’ll be able to input relevant numbers and figures and let the program generate appropriate formatting and data visualizations.
That means you’ll be able to start planning your next project that much sooner.
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Before & After: Server Room Refresh
Everyday our field engineers and technical support specialists face both challenging and rewarding experiences out in the field. Recently, our team gave one of our clients, a Biotech & Life Sciences Company, a complete server room refresh. Between untangling cables, figuring out the most optimal (and personal) color coding system, and configuring servers to meet the clients' business needs, our team was hard at work and now have the results to prove it! Check out the Sway below to see behind-the-scenes before and after shots of this server room makeover:
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Learn more about professional services provided by Managed Solution
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To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617
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August Power BI Desktop Update: Updated Drill experience
In the August update of Power BI Desktop, we released the general availability of inline hierarchies. Inline hierarchies let you explore your data as you drill down in the context of your hierarchies. As an example, imagine you were looking at your Sales Amount by Order Date.
You start out looking at each year, and now you want to see quarters as well. When you expand down using inline hierarchies, we will carry the parent category down so you can differentiate the sales in each quarter for each year.
The previous behavior for drill wouldn’t split out individual quarters by year. It would show sales in each quarter across all years.
In the August release of the Desktop, we took inline hierarchies out of preview, and replaced this previous drill experience with the inline hierarchy experience. Since that update, we have heard feedback from you that while this new experience is very useful, you still have a need for the older experience, especially when using drill with unrelated categories in the hierarchy.
We listened to your feedback, and today we are releasing an update to the August Power BI Desktop release that gives you the ability to use both of these experience in one chart. Once you install this update, you will see two buttons on a visual that has a hierarchy in the axis. The double down arrow icon (
) will do the previous experience of showing the next level of the hierarchy, and the split arrow icon (
) will perform the new inline hierarchy experience explained above. You will see this update in the Power BI web service as well.
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Microsoft to buy LinkedIn for $26.2B in cash, makes big move into enterprise social media
By Ingrid Lunden as written on techcrunch.com
Huge news today in the world of M&A in enterprise and social networking services: Microsoft has announced that it is acquiring LinkedIn, the social network for professionals with some 433 million users, for $26.2 billion, or $196 per share, in cash. The transaction has already been approved by both boards, but it must still get regulatory and other approvals.
If for some reason the deal does not go through, LinkedIn will have to pay Microsoft a $725 million termination fee, according to Microsoft’s SEC filing detailing the merger.
The $196 per share offer is a big hike on its closing price from Friday, $131.08. (And in pre-market trading, unsurprisingly, LinkedIn’s stock has nearly crept up 64 percent to reach the share price Microsoft is paying. Microsoft’s price is down 4 percent to $49.66 in pre-market trading.)
LinkedIn is keeping its branding and product, and it will become a part of Microsoft’s productivity and business processes segment. LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner will report to Satya Nadella.
How Microsoft plans to use LinkedIn
The acquisition is a big one for both sides.
For Microsoft, it’s bringing a key, missing piece into the company’s strategy to build out more services for enterprises, and give it a key way to compete better against the likes of Salesforce (which it also reportedly tried to buy).
Today, Microsoft is focused squarely on software (and some hardware by way of its very downsized phones business). But LinkedIn will give Microsoft a far bigger reach in terms of social networking services and professional content — developing the early signs of enterprise social networking that it kicked off with its acquisition of Yammer for $1.2 billion in 2012.
LinkedIn’s wider social network, pegged as it is to groups of employees and employers, will give Microsoft a sales channel to sell more of its products, and will serve as a complement to those that it already offers for collaboration and communication.
In a section called “Selling to Social Selling” in the deck below, Microsoft details how it plans to use LinkedIn’s social graph as an integrated selling tool alongside its existing CRM products (which are second to Salesforce in the market currently). Users of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM and other systems, it notes, will want to use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator “to transform the sales cycle with actionable insights” — essentially lots of background information about users that can help find leads, open conversations and close deals.
There are other elements of LinkedIn’s business that are interesting to consider in light of this acquisition. LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com, for example, to spearhead a move into offering online learning tools to users — expanding on their bigger hope of being the go-to place for overall professional development. Now, with Microsoft, you can see how Lynda might be employed to help sell Microsoft software products, and provide assistance in learning to use them. This is also an area that Microsoft is already highlighting as a positive in the deal:
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There are also other areas where you will see lots of natural integrations, for example with Cortana and providing more professional networking tools to users.
“The LinkedIn team has grown a fantastic business centered on connecting the world’s professionals,” Nadella said in a statement. “Together we can accelerate the growth of LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics as we seek to empower every person and organization on the planet.” You can read Nadella’s full memo to staff here.
(And just as a side note, this puts some of Microsoft’s recent cost-cutting through layoffs and sales into some perspective, as well.)
For LinkedIn, it puts to rest questions of how the company would ever compete with companies that are building more software on top of their social graphs that would put it into closer competition against LinkedIn. For a while, it looked like this was the direction that LinkedIn hoped to develop, but more recent problems with user and revenue growth, and a subsequent dropping share price, has put the company on the defensive.
“Just as we have changed the way the world connects to opportunity, this relationship with Microsoft, and the combination of their cloud and LinkedIn‘s network, now gives us a chance to also change the way the world works,” Weiner added in the statement. “For the last 13 years, we’ve been uniquely positioned to connect professionals to make them more productive and successful, and I’m looking forward to leading our team through the next chapter of our story.” Read Weiner’s letter on the deal to LinkedIn staff here.
But this is not at all a story about a failing company getting scooped up on the way down for parts. LinkedIn, even with a share price that is below its 12-month high point of $258 per share, is one of the better-performing tech companies in the public markets.
Microsoft has never been a massively successful company when it comes to social networking — although it smartly invested in Facebook before it went public, and as we have reported before it was apparently interested at one point in trying to make a bid to buy Slack for $8 billion. LinkedIn’s social network will give it a significant foothold in this area.
LinkedIn is active in over 200 countries and has 105 million monthly active users, with 433 million registered overall. The company has some 60 percent of all traffic on mobile, and — thanks to some strong SEO — a crazy 45 billion quarterly page views. It’s also one of the biggest repositories of job listings, with some 7 million active listings currently. While some parts of LinkedIn’s business has stagnated, specifically with MAU growth (which is up only 9 percent on last year) latter is a growing business — up 101 percent on a year ago.
LinkedIn’s core business is based today around recruitment ads and, to a lesser extent, premium subscriptions for users. The recruitment business (termed “Talent Solutions”) accounted for $2 billion of the company’s $3 billion in revenues in 2015.
And as you can see from the photo above, Reid Hoffman, one of the co-founders and current chairman, is behind the deal.
“Today is a re-founding moment for LinkedIn. I see incredible opportunity for our members and customers and look forward to supporting this new and combined business,” said Hoffman in a statement. “I fully support this transaction and the Board’s decision to pursue it, and will vote my shares in accordance with their recommendation on it.”
The companies are hosting a conference call at 8.45 a.m. PT.
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Welcome to the Invisible Revolution
Think of your favorite pieces of technology. These are the things that you use every day for work and play, and pretty much can’t live without.
Chances are, at least one of them is a gadget – your phone, maybe, or your gaming console.
But if you really think about it, chances also are good that many of your most beloved technologies are no longer made of plastic, metal and glass.
Maybe it’s a streaming video service you use to binge watch “Game of Thrones” on or an app that lets you track your steps and calories so you can fit into those jeans you wore back in high school. Maybe it’s a virtual assistant that helps you remember where your meetings are and when you need to take your medicine, or an e-reader that lets you get lost in your favorite book via your phone, tablet or even car speakers.
Perhaps, quietly and without even realizing it, your most beloved technologies have gone from being things you hold to services you rely on, and that exist everywhere and nowhere. Instead of the gadgets themselves, they are tools that you expect to be able to use on any type of gadget: Your phone, your PC, maybe even your TV.
They are part of what Harry Shum, executive vice president in charge of Microsoft’s Technology and Research division, refers to as an “invisible revolution.”
“We are on the cusp of creating a world in which technology is increasingly pervasive but is also increasingly invisible,” Shum said.
Read the full story here.
Office365's Government Community Cloud: Benefits, Features, and Capabilities
Microsoft created Office365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) to cater exclusively to the unique needs of federal, state, and local government entities. Here’s how GCC continues to provide cutting-edge solutions for secure, compliant, and efficient government operations in 2024.
Safe, Secure, Separate
Microsoft ensures government data remains safe, secure, and separate with GCC. Office365 GCC employs data separation at the application layer. For advanced security, GCC utilizes a dedicated infrastructure distinct from that used for commercial Office365 customers, adding an additional layer of physical separation for customer content.
Data Won't Need a Passport
All data stored in GCC is confined to the United States. This geographical restriction eliminates concerns about data residency, ensuring compliance with federal regulations. GCC data centers are exclusively located in the U.S., with Office365 services tailored to meet governmental requirements.
Restricted Access
Microsoft personnel accessing Office365 Government CC must be U.S. citizens and undergo rigorous background investigations to guarantee the highest security standards. This ensures that those handling government data are as thoroughly vetted as any other guardian of sensitive information.
Certifications and Accreditations
Office 365 Government adheres to the necessary certifications and accreditations for U.S. Public Sector clients, supporting the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) at a Moderate Impact level. Additionally, GCC meets CJIS requirements, supporting law enforcement agencies with Exchange Online, Exchange Online Archiving, SharePoint Online, and Office Online.
Enhanced Security Features
In 2024, GCC continues to enhance its security framework, integrating advanced threat protection, encryption, and compliance features to safeguard data and ensure uninterrupted operations. Microsoft’s investments in AI and machine learning further bolster security, detecting and responding to threats in real-time.
Streamlined Collaboration Tools
GCC includes the latest updates to Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, facilitating seamless collaboration among government employees. These tools are designed to enhance productivity while maintaining stringent security and compliance standards.
Compliance and Regulatory Support
GCC is designed to support various compliance requirements, including FedRAMP, CJIS, ITAR, and more. It ensures that all Office365 services are aligned with the latest regulatory standards, making compliance management straightforward and efficient.
Learn More
Discover how Office365 Government Community Cloud can elevate your local, state, or federal government operations by providing secure, compliant, and innovative solutions. Contact us today to learn more about how GCC can meet your specific needs in 2024 and beyond!
NASA tech could trim air travel delays
By Derek Major as written on gsn.com
When severe storms hit, air travel delays are all but guaranteed. Last month alone, more than 10,000 flights were cancelled in a three-day period after a snowstorm dropped up to 30 inches on the East Coast from New York to Georgia. But NASA is working on a software-driven solution that could ease the pain for travellers, airlines and air traffic controllers alike.
NASA's Ames Research Center, the Federal Aviation Administration and industry developers are developing and testing a system known as Dynamic Weather Routes. According to NASA, the system updates and compares weather and air traffic data to find alternate routes when severe weather is likely to impact planes already in the air.
The DWR system collects and updates weather and air traffic information every 12 seconds and uses the data to find alternative routes and resolve air traffic conflicts. (The traditional method depends on a teleconference held every two hours.) DWR can account for frequent weather changes and plot new routes to avoid traffic or airspace that is designated for special use.
A 10-person team has been developing DWR since 2010, and research shows the software could save 10 minutes per flight. “The [current] static weather avoidance routes may not be well tailored to the weather of the day,” Kapil Sheth, a NASA aerospace research engineer, explained. “Large buffers compensate for forecast uncertainty of up to four hours ahead. When weather changes, it leaves an opportunity to save time and fuel.”
The Ames Research Center was awarded a patent for DWR late last year, and an industry partner has been field testing the prototype system for more than two years. Dave McNally, NASA’s principal investigator for DWR, said that one aerospace company already has licensed DWR, and the system is currently being used for advisories on flights.
NASA tech could trim air travel delays
By Derek Major as written on gsn.com
When severe storms hit, air travel delays are all but guaranteed. Last month alone, more than 10,000 flights were cancelled in a three-day period after a snowstorm dropped up to 30 inches on the East Coast from New York to Georgia. But NASA is working on a software-driven solution that could ease the pain for travellers, airlines and air traffic controllers alike.
NASA's Ames Research Center, the Federal Aviation Administration and industry developers are developing and testing a system known as Dynamic Weather Routes. According to NASA, the system updates and compares weather and air traffic data to find alternate routes when severe weather is likely to impact planes already in the air.
The DWR system collects and updates weather and air traffic information every 12 seconds and uses the data to find alternative routes and resolve air traffic conflicts. (The traditional method depends on a teleconference held every two hours.) DWR can account for frequent weather changes and plot new routes to avoid traffic or airspace that is designated for special use.
A 10-person team has been developing DWR since 2010, and research shows the software could save 10 minutes per flight. “The [current] static weather avoidance routes may not be well tailored to the weather of the day,” Kapil Sheth, a NASA aerospace research engineer, explained. “Large buffers compensate for forecast uncertainty of up to four hours ahead. When weather changes, it leaves an opportunity to save time and fuel.”
The Ames Research Center was awarded a patent for DWR late last year, and an industry partner has been field testing the prototype system for more than two years. Dave McNally, NASA’s principal investigator for DWR, said that one aerospace company already has licensed DWR, and the system is currently being used for advisories on flights.
