Gartner recognizes Microsoft as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace for seven years running!

Gartner recognizes Microsoft as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace for seven years running!: Yammer has long recognized that social networking has the ability to revolutionize information-sharing in the workplace, which is why we first launched an enterprise social network in 2008. Now, for the seventh year in a row, Gartner recognizes Microsoft as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, reflecting Yammer's vision for workplace collaboration. —Read more about Yammer from Bryan Goode.

Is your data safe with Microsoft Office 365?

Skype for Business iOS app now available

Skype for Business iOS app now available: We’ve been working hard to ensure Skype for Business can make you productive on any device. Since we announced the Skype for Business for iOS preview, we’ve received great response, and today we are excited to announce that the new Skype for Business app for iOS devices is now publicly available.

The Financial Services Compliance Program is now publicly available

The Financial Services Compliance Program is now publicly available

How to deliver Inspiring Presentations by @docjamesw

I really enjoyed this dissection of an interesting presentation by James Whittaker.

Probably the best use of 16 minutes spent today.

https://blogs.office.com/2015/10/06/master-the-art-of-stage-presence-with-james-whittaker/

Major overhaul of OneDrive for Buiness - includes selective sync

Microsoft have announced a major overhaul of their OnDrive for Business service, promising some much awaited features.

The following is taken from the OneDrive  Blog https://blog.onedrive.com/e.com/ : 

Rock-Solid Sync

Starting today, we’re launching a preview of the next generation sync client (NGSC) for organizations. The preview client adds OneDrive for Business connectivity to our proven OneDrive consumer client. The new client (available for both PC and Mac) offers improved reliability and selective sync, as well as removing the 20,000 file sync limit and extending support for files up to 10GB in size (these limits will remain for the duration of the preview but be removed when we launch broadly). For IT we’ve also included the ability to silently deploy and configure the client on behalf of your users.

We want everyone to have a great preview experience, so we’re rolling it out in stages to manage high demand and to make sure the setup experience is smooth and reliable. We’ve set up a waitlist website for you to reserve a place for your organization. When the preview is ready for your organization, we’ll send you an email with all the instructions on where to download it and how to set it up. Learn more here.

Simplified browser experience

We’ve completely refreshed the browser experience, employing the best practices from our OneDrive consumer experience used by millions every day. The resulting browser experience is clean, intuitive and beautiful. A highlight of the new browser experience is the ability to switch between a list and preview tile view which makes it easy to identify key files. All of the key actions you want to take on a file or folder, such as preview, edit, share and delete, are conveniently located on the toolbar or by right-clicking a specific file or folder. This new browser experience makes managing your work files easier than ever. Learn more here.

Enhanced sharing

You could always share your files with anyone inside or outside your organization, but now we’re giving you more flexibility in how you do this. We’ve added new sharing options such as letting people you’ve shared with invite others in your organization to the file or folder as well as the ability to set an expiration date on a sharing link when you need greater control. Learn more here.

 

Mobile productivity

There are significant new enhancements to the mobile apps. Starting with Android, you will be able to take files offline! You can flag one or more files for offline access and then open these files when disconnected, ensuring access to your files wherever you may be.

There are some cool new features in the iOS app as well! There’s a new streamlined way to trigger common actions on files (share, move, delete and details) simply by pressing and holding on the file you want to use. We’ve also added PDF annotations – the ability to draw, highlight and comment on your PDF files – directly in the OneDrive app.

 

We know great mobile productivity is essential, so you can count on us to keep adding features to all our apps to ensure you can do anything with your OneDrive files on your phone or tablet regardless of whether you are online or not. Learn more here.

Protecting your people and data

Of course, providing a great user experience is vital to driving adoption of any file sync and sharing solution like OneDrive for Business, but this can’t be at the expense of ensuring that IT can stay in control of corporate data. To help IT in this area, we’re delivering new controls to manage how files flow outside your organization, including auditing external sharing invitations and limiting which users can share externally. In the coming weeks, we’ll preview a feature that enables limiting the external domains your users can share with. Learn morehere.

New developer opportunities

We want developers to be able to build rich apps that integrate with OneDrive (both consumer and business). Previously we made announcements about preview support for OneDrive for Business in our unified OneDrive API. Today, we are starting to roll out this OneDrive API for production use. Learn more here.

Meet the new OneDrive for Business today!

Today marks tremendous progress but we aren’t done. With OneDrive for Business we’re all in to continue meeting and exceeding your expectations. In the coming months we’ll share even more about the innovation coming across every aspect of the service.

Get started today with the new OneDrive for Business and give us your feedback on UserVoice.

The new Visio is here—work visually

Visio is the industry-leading diagramming solution used by over 12 million users, and today we’re thrilled to share our latest innovations with you.

Visio 2016 makes it easier for everyone to define business processes, document best practices, visualize the future state of transformative initiatives and stay on top of operational insights. Using Office 365, you can share these Visio diagrams with everyone and communicate one version of the truth to drive organization-wide alignment.

Visio 2016 offers starter diagrams, hundreds of smart shapes, one-step data linking, Information Rights Management (IRM) for compliance and so much more. Working visually is now faster and easier than ever.

Get started quickly

When starting out, the new Visio offers a set of pre-crafted starter diagrams and contextual tips and tricks to help you easily create, edit and complete your diagram.

These quickly executable diagrams are available in 15 of the most popular domains (flowcharts, timelines, workflows, etc.) and will inspire and guide you from start to finish.

The new built-in Tell Me support helps you navigate more than 800 commands in Visio. Just ask Visio how to do something and the relevant commands are displayed in a simple drop-down list. You can execute the command just by clicking one of the options listed. Now even new users can leverage the full capabilities of Visio.

Be productive and compliant

Visio offers thousands of shapes that meet industry standards, including BPMN 2.0, UML 2.4 and IEEE (new). Whether you want to map out an IT network, build an org chart, document a business process, draw a modern floor plan or capture a flowchart from a whiteboard, the new Visio can help you work visually and stay compliant.

Here are some examples:

One-stop process modeling.

Updated office layout template with modern style.

IEEE-compliant electrical diagram.

Easily connect data to diagrams

With Visio, you can link diagrams to popular data sources such as Excel, Active Directory, SharePoint and SQL Server to display data on top of real-world visuals. For example, you could depict an assembly line in Visio and connect different components of that diagram to real-time operational data. Data-linked diagrams can update automatically and will display different icons, symbols and colors to reflect changes in the underlying data.

The Visio 2016 Quick Import capability now makes it easy for anyone to link data to real-world diagrams, plans and processes. With a single click, the new Visio can automatically identify the data source, import the data, link that data to shapes and apply data graphics. With one-step data linking, you can easily turn diagrams into dashboards and monitor progress or performance in real time.

Visio 2016 also makes it easy to swap out the graphics to your preference with a single click and make your data easily digestible.

Collaborate with confidence

More than ever before, our day-to-day work involves collaborating with others. This means sensitive information within diagrams requires new levels of protection. Visio 2016 now supports Information Rights Management (IRM) and lets you control document rights at the individual user level.

With Visio 2016 you can work visually, leverage data and protect sensitive information like never before. Experience the new Visio for yourself by starting your trial of Visio Pro for Office 365 now!

OneNote for Schools just got better!

School has started in most parts of the world, and the OneNote team has some exciting announcements to share! As we mentioned on the Microsoft Education blog earlier this month, OneNote Class Notebooks and OneNote Staff Notebooks are now available for Office 365 customers (teachers and faculty) around the world. We’ve seen OneNote Class Notebooks created in 95 countries, and Staff Notebooks created in 45 countries. More OneNote Class and Staff Notebooks are being created by teachers and staff every day!

We are listening to feedback from teachers and staff and improving Class Notebooks based suggestions from educators. Today we are happy to announce the upcoming release of two new capabilities, which are a direct result of talking to teachers and were also announced in our blog post back in May. We will gradually roll out these features to education customers over the coming weeks. We will also release these updates to Staff Notebooks in the near future.

Remove students or co-teacher permissions from a Class Notebook

The top request we’ve heard is to be able to easily remove a student’s permissions from a Class Notebook. When a student leaves the class, you can now quickly go into the Class Notebook app and remove that student from your class by clicking the Add or remove students tile. Removed students will not have access to the Class Notebook anymore. However, their work will still remain in your notebook, so that you can choose to archive it or delete it permanently.

You can also now remove co-teachers by clicking the Add or remove teachers tile. This will remove permissions of any co-teacher who had access to the Class Notebook.

Add student groups to a class notebook

Teachers are now able to add groups (i.e. class lists) of students to a Class Notebook. This allows a teacher to add an entire class by just typing one name into the Add students dialog—e.g. “Mrs. Smith’s Math class Period 1.” Previously, each student needed to be entered manually, so we hope this feature will save teachers a lot of time. We hope this will also help simplify the process of adding students to a class while leveraging work already done by IT staff for preparing class lists in Office 365.

We also support Active Directory Security Groups and Office 365 Groups when adding students.

Update group membership changes to your class notebook

Did a bunch of students join or leave your class this year? Not to worry! The Class Notebook app can now grab updates in group membership from your school directory. Simply click the Add orRemove Students tile and proceed through the steps. You will be able to preview the latest list of students in your class, and we will set up or remove their student notebooks once you confirm.

New languages supported

In addition to these two top features, we also want to announce that OneNote Class Notebooks now supports Right-to-Left (RTL) languages, including Arabic, Hebrew and Persian.

Microsoft Project & Portfolio Roadmap for Office 365

Microsoft have shared their new PPM roadmap with customers

For your convenience, I've enclosed a copy of the PDF

Project Roadmap

Office Delve adds Praise, Favorites and enhances content creation

Office Delve adds Praise, Favorites and enhances content creation

Move from Office 365 Midsize Business to Business Premium - the goalpost has changed

In July 2014, Microsoft announced a new set of subscription plans designed to meet the needs of small and midsized customers. These subscriptions have been available for purchase since October 2014 for new customers, and will ultimately replace the plans existing customers have in place.   

Reminder, existing customers were to begin transitioning to the new plans at the first renewal after October 1, 2015. 

Today, we are informing you that this date has now moved to December 1, 2015.

After December 1, customers will need to select one of the new plans at their next renewal date.

Resources:

Updated guidance for customers

Overview of SMB Sku Transitions document for partners

Your top 10 questions about Office 2016 answered

Your top 10 questions about Office 2016 answered: We are thrilled to see the positive response for the launch of Office 2016 last week. We’ve received a ton of great feedback and wanted to address some of your top questions.

Likes and @Mentions coming to Outlook on the web

Likes and @Mentions coming to Outlook on the web: Likes and @Mentions allows you to highlight the individuals and ideas within a collaborative setting using social gestures you are likely already familiar with.