If you’re like Jenn Schaal, a busy sales manager for an international trade association, your day is filled with client connections, budgets to hit and leads to generate—on top of day-to-day fires to put out. Hitting the end goal—whether it’s a sales target or a client win—takes time and effort. Office 365 helps shave off time throughout the day, so sales managers can meet their goals.
Taking a note from her powerlifting hobby, Jenn wanted to carry over the sense of feeling strong and in charge into her job. She found three ways Office 365 helps her save time, work smarter and be more efficient on the go.
1. Take the hassle out of travel with OneDrive for Business
Travel is almost synonymous with sales, and while it’s invaluable for meeting clients or attending trade events, it can be challenging to stay in sync with reports and presentations being updated back in the office. Jenn knows this all too well. With most of her clients in different markets, she needs to have all the important info in one convenient spot while on the road. With OneDrive for Business, Jenn can pull up files or media kits to share and knows exactly where to find what she needs.
Plus, OneDrive for Business does more than let you view and edit your documents from anywhere. For example:
If your computer happens to die, get lost or is stolen on that important sales trip, you can use someone else’s device and sign in as yourself. Office 365 remembers your most recent documents, so you’ll always have access to client presentations or reports.
Stuck somewhere without internet access but want to get some work done? OneDrive for Business helps you get around your Wi-Fi troubles and work offline by syncing files and folders into your library.
For large ongoing projects, instead of sending specific files, it can be easier to share a whole folder with your client, so that they always have access to the latest reports on OneDrive for Business.
2. Stay on top of what matters with Outlook
Like many people, most of Jenn’s day is spent in Outlook emailing clients, setting up meetings, viewing the team calendar and sending and receiving the latest sales reports. She likes having the same functionality and rich features in the Outlook app, which is especially useful for travel and staying connected on the go.
Power-user tips for smarter emailing and calendaring with Outlook help you get even more done:
Sending a large presentation to a client and don’t want to overflow their inbox? Share as a OneDrive cloud attachment and not only free up space, but make last-minute tweaks without having to re-send the file.
Use Outlook Customer Manager to track customers and see all related info—email, meetings, calls, notes, files, tasks, deals and deadlines—in a convenient focused list view. Deals and even customers can be prioritized and then easily shared with other team members.
3. Stay in touch with your team or clients with Skype for Business
Whether you have a few remote team members, like Jenn, or multiple sales offices across the country, staying connected and aligned on business priorities is key. With Skype for Business, Jenn can easily turn a messaging chat into a call to quickly resolve a problem or close a deal.
There are other ways that Skype can help bridge the distance between teams or clients:
Want to have a call with a client not on Skype for Business? No problem! Meet with up to 250 people—all they need is a phone or internet connection to get started.
Don’t just talk, have a truly interactive meeting by sharing your screen and annotating PowerPoint for real-time collaboration. Then share it all with anyone who couldn’t make it via a recording. You can also use a whiteboard, polls, Q&A and built-in IM during your sales meetings for instant feedback.
Help build connections and relationships with remote clients through video calls. Enjoy industry-leading HD video for online meetings that feel top quality and trustworthy. Focus more on the people in your call, with added features like automatic cropping and head tracking.
Whether it’s storing, syncing and sharing files in OneDrive for Business; smarter emailing or calendaring with the Outlook app; or audio, HD video and web conferencing with Skype for Business; there are many reasons to become a champion for the latest productivity technology within your team or company.
New Yammer features help users more easily connect and collaborate
New capabilities for Yammer announced on Tuesday will make it easier for employees to connect and engage across organizations.
The changes, announced during Microsoft’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, include the ability to enrich new SharePoint communication sites, coming this summer, with a conversational layer by bringing Yammer and SharePoint together. The integration will be further enhanced over the coming months with additional improvements.
Users can now share and play videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream directly within their Yammer conversations. They can also use Office 365 Connectors to bring relevant content and updates from more than 90 popular third-party apps and services into Yammer conversations.
Yammer groups can now be more easily managed through dynamic group membership that updates automatically as people join, leave or move within organizations. And since staying connected requires versatile tools, Microsoft announced new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac.
Watch the video to learn more:
The new Office.com gets first major update
By Tom Batcheler as written on blogs.office.com
Back in April, we started rolling out a new Office 365 home page experience that provided a redesigned environment for commercial, education and home users to collaborate and work across every device. The update also delivered improved access to recent files and folders and introduced a new platform for faster delivery of innovative features.
We’re now rolling out new changes that will greatly increase the ease of navigating apps and improve access to frequent and recently opened documents. These changes started rolling out in December and will continue through early 2017.
Get back to your online documents
We know that your best work can take time, so we improved access to your unfinished documents. Users will now see additional controls within the “Recent documents” list to let users filter by document type across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Have a document that you go back to frequently? Pin it to the list so it’s always just a click away.
Know what’s coming up
We made it easier to see what’s coming up at a glance. Get an in-depth view of the day’s meetings and quickly respond to or join Skype for Business calls with one click. Enhanced people pictures help you build stronger connections with coworkers and help you keep track of your different teams and projects.
Stay on top of tasks
Create, view and complete tasks directly on Office.com that stay in sync across Outlook on all your devices. Need to add more details to a task? Double tap to open in Outlook Tasks to add additional details.
New Microsoft Garage mobile app, Clip Layer, provides easy sharing of information across Android apps
Nowadays, it’s common to use your smartphone to share articles, photos, directions and much more. While some apps make it easy to do that, others don’t. But with a new app released through the Microsoft Garage called Clip Layer, you can easily snip and share almost anything that appears on an Android screen.
Clip Layer applies a universal overlay over any screen that makes it quick and easy to select a snippet of information, copy it and act on it by sharing or including it in an email.
“Like a lot of people, my phone is the center of my life,” says Steve Won, a senior designer with Microsoft’s Office team and creator of Clip Layer. “I like to share what I’ve seen and I noticed a couple of problems unique to consuming on a smartphone.”
For instance, he found it hard on some apps to select anything, and even if there was a way to do that, it was oftentimes cumbersome to press and hold on content and then to drag two grabbers, which was required in order to select. He noticed it was a common problem across apps, and it became the starting point for this project.
This is Won’s second app released through The Garage following Hub Keyboard, which uses an Android keyboard to show a clipboard, pull contact info, get document links from the cloud, translate, show web results and allow rephrasing of sentences through a thesaurus.
“If I take another step back, the root of the issue is similar to Hub Keyboard,” Won says. “Apps being silo’d is a common problem for both, as there is no standard way to share or pull information across apps. There’s been a lot of growth with smartphones and ecosystems, as there are more apps that come into stores, but the same problem keeps persisting: less apps able to talk with each other, as they’re designed to work independent of each other. But while the keyboard is focused on input and only shows up when the app allows input, Clip Layer has more coverage and works on any screen. Hub Keyboard was focused composing, and this one is focused on sharing and re-using what already exists.”
After his team’s success with Hub Keyboard, which confirmed the problem of silos and validated the approach of giving users more to do with keyboards, he turned to consuming and sharing without a keyboard through Clip Layer in April.
Hub Keyboard gave him hands-on coding experience, so he decided to develop Clip Layer by himself, as a design idea, and to provide insights to other teams at Microsoft interested in on-screen captures like this.
“I feel like The Garage gives us a lighter weight process to experiment and share a lot of learnings with other teams too,” Won says. “It’s a win-win for project teams and Microsoft.”
From Clip Layer, he wants to find out if the overlay approach solves the problem of sharing when there isn’t an obvious way of doing so in an app. And, he wants to find out what people do with the information – do they email it or share it on social media? How do they make use of it?
Going through The Garage process with Hub Keyboard helped prepare him better for submitting Clip Layer.
“It’s always smoother the second time around,” Won says. “Your first startup gets you ready for the second one. The first time around, besides product development, all this stuff was new to me – like the release checklist. I was a lot more anxious. This time around, at least I had a better idea of the entire picture. I had peace of mind, knowing what to expect and how to plan for everything.”
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The new Office.com gets first major update
