Wednesday 9/27 – How to enable and configure Microsoft Teams for your users
Posted on September 27, 2017 Leave a Comment
Official Description…
In this session we talk through all the steps required to get started with Microsoft Teams – how to license and enable users and how to prepare your environment. We also address the different configuration options to ensure that you set up your tenant in a way which meets your needs.
Slides: <link>
Blake’s Take’s…
Sew after talking to the TCF folks, we should probably evaluate Teams as part of our overall collaboration strategy (even if only for ruling it out). They utilize Teams at TCF for many purposes that we currently leverage email. I feel like if you commit as an organization to the whole Microsoft 365 experience, Teams will be at the core of that (at least from Microsoft’s strategy perspective).
This presentation was all slide-driven and very bullet-point technical. Hence, here are the pertinent slides:
The slides contain the pertinent links to the PowerShell scripts to limit O365 group creation. That was alluded to in a previous session, but they were kind enough to link them here. The Teams experience is heavily reliant on Outlook in the cloud, so it would be impossible for us now. But it is yet another indication of how important Outlook in the cloud is to a successful MS 365 experience. Without it, the experience is very “choppy”: some things work, some things don’t. Rather than using MS 365 as a singular collaboration platform, we’ll be using it for point solutions for collaboration.
Just my $0.02
Tuesday 9/26 – Can I get a side of OneDrive for Business with my SharePoint?
Posted on September 27, 2017 Leave a Comment
Official Description…
When working with Microsoft collaboration tools there is always a lot of conversation about what to use when. SharePoint and OneDrive for Business are best served together in Office 365. In this session, we walk through OneDrive for Business and the capabilities for collaboration and how they relate to your overall SharePoint solution.
Slides: <link>
Blake’s Takes…
Another pre-happy hour show in the big Expo center…
Why does every AV expert at these things have a goatee and man bun?
OneDrive = my files
SharePoint = our files
Most users start creating content in OneDrive. Users control all of their OneDrive content. All of the content lifecycle happens within OneDrive, controlled by the OneDrive user. Content created in OneDrive will remain in OneDrive by default.
SharePoint content is under control of all members of the SharePoint group. The site admin is ultimately in control of the content lifecycle.
Use OneDrive for:
- Private files
- Limited access (share with only individuals)
- No other place to put it (no logical SP location)
Rule of thumb: start in OneDrive.
Sync Client – syncs files from both OneDrive and SP.
Moving files between OneDrive and SP is not a feature yet, you have to use Copy. 500MB is the file size limit within the browser.
http://greatriverenergy.onedrive.com is the direct URL to out OneDrive.
Tuesday 9/26 – Beverage Service
Posted on September 26, 2017 Leave a Comment
One-word review: adequate.
There is plenty of marginal English Breakfast tea packets to be had. Sadly, there is no viable alternative to half and half being offered, so I’ve probably drunk a quart of it by now via the countless tiny single-serving thingys I’ve used to spike my marginal tea.
Tuesday 9/26 – Manage Microsoft Office apps on all your devices
Posted on September 26, 2017 Leave a Comment
Official Description…
In this session we demonstrate how, using your Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus license, you can reap the benefits of Office apps on iOS, Android, and Windows. From key end user functionality to IT admin control, hear the end-to-end story for Microsoft’s cross-platform Office apps.
Slides: <link>
Blake’s Takes…
Hey, guess what? PPT now allows for 3D images. So that will TOTALLY make PPTs way more better and stuff, I’m sure.
So “Microsoft 365” was just defined for us (finally) as all of these:
- Windows
- Enterprise Mobile & Secirity
- Office 365
“1 of 10 employees will sell their corporate login credentials for $1,000 or more.” Not sure where they grabbed that stat, but interesting…they are continuing to hammer the notion of turning on multi-factor authentication for anyone with an admin account. The default O365 MFA mechanism is sending a temporary PIN to a mobile device.
Someone in Service Desk should look at InTune. It is Microsoft’s MDM application. The mobile experience for O365 users can be configured across the organization. You define a company portal, then you assign the apps that appear there, and that’s what everyone sees. You can also set policies for OneDrive and SharePoint mobile apps via InTune.
You can additionally restrict many functions in the browser for OneDrive and SharePoint. The demo they did was to restrict print, save as, and sync in OneDrive when you are logging into O365 from a non-company device. This could quell a lot of security concerns. It could also be incredibly annoying. But it’s a thing now with the InTune thing.
There is a way to disable external sharing on a per-document basis. Again, this could help quell security concerns about certain clumps of content. You can even get more granular than that. You can restrict all sorts of things on a per-document basis.
Tuesday 9/26 – The keys to Office 365 Groups management
Posted on September 26, 2017 Leave a Comment
Official Description…
In this session, we share experience in providing governance and management capabilities for Office 365 Groups. We show how an Office 365 Groups concept can be implemented in a secure way, what management capabilities are available, and how to address them. Learn how to manage Office 365 Groups with the help of PowerShell and Microsoft Graph. We look into Groups administration, how to setup current policies, how to implement them, and how to govern them. We also share some best practices around Groups management.
Blake’s Takes…
The presenter has a brilliant Austrian accent, so that’s a thing.
Apparently, it is very common for companies to disable O365 Groups before a full O365 deployment??? She highly recommends a governance and naming policy for O365 Groups. One way to enforce these is to create a workflow that requires someone to “OK” the group creation/name.
A lot of this is done via PowerShell (restricting who can create groups). The concept is to create an AD group of users who can create O365 Groups.
Again, a lot of this is done via PoweShell scripting. So conceptually these are great ideas, but in practice, we’d have to track down some of the PowerShell scripts.
Tuesday 9/26 – Wall of Geekdom
Posted on September 26, 2017 Leave a Comment
So there is this magical place called the West Expo Center. It contains a wall of 18 presentations running simultaneously. You pull up a beanbag, plug into one of the receivers, and switch between the 18 presentations. I was unaware of this most awesome way to take in a conference, but the folks from TCF were. We spent the entire AM flipping between presentations, drinking coffee & tea, and lounging in beanbags commiserating about trying to roll out O365.
It.
Was.
Brilliant.
Tuesday 9/26 – New web experiences in Office 365 that empower your users
Posted on September 26, 2017 Leave a Comment
Official Description…
More than ever before, users expect an unparalleled productivity experience on the web. We’ve designed Office 365 to be a universal toolkit that empowers everyone with powerful communication, collaboration and authoring tools that work for you. See the big changes coming to the Office 365 browser experience to help your users navigate documents and apps, get started quicker, and understand the applications and services available to them.
Slides: <link>
Blake Takes…
Yet another overly excited start to another session…
- “so exciting”
- “amazing innovations”
- “super proud”
So apparently www.office.com is something to which we all have access as MS 365 subscribers. It is not entirely clear what the difference is between that and the O365 waffle. I attempted to log in with my GRE credentials and there was an “SSO error”. I can, however, log in with my personal SP site credentials. So, someone is going to have to get to the bottom of how SSO works with office.com for GRE users.
Microsoft Fluent is a new design language that Microsoft is pushing. It will be implemented in the MS 365 arena first. It will likely be a good plan to have the developer types look into getting fluent with Fluent.
So Office 365 is set up as a bit of a personal dashboard. It may be another option besides Delve, SP tile, or SHI StartScreen. It is definitely worth looking into. It would be ideal if someone at the service desk started to get into this. Here is what my personal dashboard looks like for my personal SP instance:
The Office.com UI does also present a lot of analytics around documents. There are features like:
- “pin” – mark a document as important
- “subscribe” – get updates on document changes
- “discover” – suggests document that may be relevant
- “remove from list” – prune documents that are not actually relevant
Monday 9/25 – Expo Pano
Posted on September 26, 2017 Leave a Comment
This ridiculously restrictive layout won’t do the shot justice, but here is the Expo floor in all of it’s gory, err…I mean glory…
Here’s another angle…
Monday 9/25 – Accelerate Office 265 Adoption Through Microsoft FastTrack Services
Posted on September 26, 2017 Leave a Comment
Official Description…
I can’t find it.
Blake’s Takes…
So I refuse to cede my groovy high-top table for one, and another presentation magically appeared. For kicks, I’m gonna just stay and watch.
So Stiller and Meara are leading off with a number of funny questions, which I always totally love!
- “How many of you work in IT groups that have lots of extra time?”
- “How many of your users read your carefully crafted how-to emails?”
According to the presenters, engaging MS FastTrack services “guarantees” Adoption success. Part of the discovery process. Is doing “a day in the life” with the users. During this discovery, a lot of shadow IT can be uncovered.
FastTrack productivity library
And the presenters brought fidget spinners…that looked like this…
Getting one was like this…
Monday 9/25 – Microsoft Office 365 adoption: If you can’t measure it, it’s not happening
Posted on September 25, 2017 Leave a Comment
Official Description…
Organizations invest a lot of money when they decide to use Office 365. Getting value for that investment is important, and the only way of understanding whether end users are taking advantage of the complete spectrum of Office 365 functionality is to measure what’s happening. With real data about real users you can see which parts of Office 365 are being used and which are not. You know whether your adoption programs are effective or need to make changes. This session covers the tools available in Office 365 to help you understand user adoption. You’ll not only learn HOW to measure adoption, but also WHAT to measure and WHY.
Slides: <link>
Blake’s Takes…
This particular presentation is titled: “Microsoft Office 365 adoption: if you can’t measure it, it’s not happening. “The reason I’m here is that I believe this to be the God’s honest truth, regardless to which higher power you submit.
So far the two presenters have talked about the idea of measuring adoption without actually explaining how it would be done. I love when presenters do this. It’s like the infomercial for the “extreme fat burning system” where they discuss the the fact they plan to reveal the secret for the entirety of the infomercial without ever revealing anything.
“O365 report reader administrator” role is new. It allows access to Usage Reports in the Admin center, but that is the only access granted is to the report data–that’s it. After the access if granted, it will be one of the tiles the user sees. The user access report are across the O365 apps (SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, etc.)
Activity reports are being generated on TEAMS starting this month. We are being assured that there are new measures added to the Admin Center Reports on a monthly basis.
Office 365 Usage Analytics will be the new name for the Adoption Content Pack. Early 2018, this will be available/rebranded, and it will measure adoption rather than usage. We gotta get on this…
They are, shockingly, a number of third party tools for analytics that leverage the date from Microsoft Graph. And of course, none were mentioned.
They did direct us to this discussion on adoption “tools”.
Blake Charles Donley 