Recent Discussions
Status of Microsoft Places
In a community call last year, there was a demo of Microsoft Places. Can anyone provide an update regarding the release date of this? We are interested in the hotel desk component of this tool. Also, is it going to be part of the Microsoft 365 licenses, Teams Premium, etc.? Thank you.WHEN TO USE WHAT - Collaboration tools in Office 365
Hello, community! I would love to see some "when to use what" resources you have for some inspiration! I had to update the one we have internally today, and the reality is that this topic never stops trending. Users are still confused... so please tell me WHEN TO USE WHAT? I found another topic in the community on this but is from 2016. I felt the need of getting some fresh perspective. What is the latest when to use what? To get started I am sharing here the communication we have in Kellogg. Would love to get your perspectives and your feedback! What app do you think is formal, informal or any tone? What app do you think is slow or fast?Office 365 Training Portal
Hi All, Microsoft has a lot of excellent training resources for the many Office 365 apps, but they can be difficult to find. To that end, I created the Office 365 Training Portal, the goal of it being to centralize access to the various Microsoft resources, including Microsoft's overview videos of the apps (where available). Is this a resource that could benefit your users/organizations? Is there anything you would recommend to make it better?
Where Does End-User Adoption Start?
This April, we're putting the focus on conversations in the Driving Adoption community. We kick off the discussion with insights from Microsoft research we conducted on IT Pros. Where Does End-User Adoption Start? End-user adoption is clearly top of mind. In our research last year, 87% of IT Pros said that driving Office 365 end-user adoption was a priority initiative in the next two years. But “adoption” refers to a wide-range of actions – some of which occur before you even deploy a new product. We asked IT Pros what adoption actions either their organizations or they, as individuals, were involved in. High-maturity cloud companies (companies with 6+ products in the cloud) were more likely to engage in pre-deployment adoption activities. Already deployed? There are still plenty of actions you can take now! In April, we’ll be discussing end-user adoption best practices, success stories, sharing resources, and answering your questions. We’ll elaborate on the actions we listed above and open the conversation to discuss any challenges/questions you have on the community! What adoption actions do you or your organization take? When did the conversation around end-user adoption start? Read these other posts featured during 'End User Adoption' month: Case Study #1: Adoption as a Marketing Campaign Case Study #2: Outsourcing Adoption Case Study #3: Organic Discovery vs Forced Adoption Friday Feature: NunoAriasSilva: 'The biggest challenge in customers adopting new technologies is helping them understand the value of technology by its features compared to its price. Some customers only upgrade their systems by feature by end of support.' Read his interview here. John White: 'If users can't see value immediately, we need to be able to demonstrate the value of a platform in order to overcome this skepticism, or resistance to change.' Read his interview here. DeletedUser2246: 'The main way I work to influence the skeptics to change is to find at least one or two little things that annoy them and make it better.' Read his interview here. Deleted: 'I make complicated things simple, relatable, and sometimes even fun. That’s been my reason for existing as a communications and change manager for more than 20 years.' Read her interview here. The Irony of Change: Think much has changed since 1985? Think again. How Do You Measure Adoption Success? Useful resources on adoption metrics. Expanding the IT Skill Toolbox: Change Management Skills. A post from a previous month's theme of IT Career Skills but relevant to this month's theme. Office 365 Adoption Guide: Matt Wolodarsky shares a useful adoption resource from Microsoft. When Adoption Goes Wrong: The community shares stories to help you learn what not to do when it comes to driving adoption. Getting Creative with Adoption: Some cool and sometimes unconventional ways people have driven adoption in their organization. Consumer vs Enterprise Adoption: Interesting post from Simon Terry highlighting the different approaches. The Growing Interest in End User Adoption: Blog post from Debbie Arbeeny from the Skype for Business team about the expansion in focus on end user adoption. Connecting with People to Drive Adoption: Sharon Liu explores three ways you might engage users in driving adoption. Reimagine the Workplace with Office 365: Cian Allner shares 360 degree videos showcasing collaboration, analytics and security in the modern workplace using Office 365 from the Microsoft Canada Customer Immersion Experience. Save Save Save SaveOctober 2018 Community Call - Presentation & Recording
Thank you to the over 900 people who attended our Champion's Community Calls yesterday. I'm personally thrilled with the response and participation. I'm including here the presentation and link to the recording of our call. Our program team learned a few things yesterday as well: Answers to Questions: Many of you had questions during the event on a variety of topics. As there are too many to answer in a single post we want to publish answers in a way that is easy to consume for everyone and begins to build a knowledge base for our community. Give us a few days to work out what that looks like and we will post the responses. Several people also made suggestions for additional topics that I'd like to post as conversation threads so we will do that as well. Availability of Information: After every call we will post a message like this that will always include the presentation and a link to the recording. I will be posting separate messages with each set of tools we discussed in the call. Topics for our Community: Many of you wanted more information on the Adoption Framework, Teams implementation, OneDrive and SharePoint subjects and to hear from others who are doing adoption projects. We are working on our coming months agenda now and all of those topics will be covered with more depth. We are seeking to have customers present to complement the Microsoft staff who will also be sharing best practices and feature information in our community. Post Event Survey: We will post the event survey separately so you can share with us your meeting feedback, agenda suggestions and a little about where you are in the adoption journey in your organization. This information will only be used to improve the experience and help us tailor the topics we present to you in this community. Thank you again for your participation and keep that feedback coming so we can make this a great experience for you all.
Looking for Adoption Guidance for Office 365? How about over 100 pages with SAMPLES?
What adoption tips, ideas and approaches have you used? There are great resources available at Success.Office.com (or FastTrack) that I know I would recommend as a great start. Just in case that isn't enough for you though... what else do you use? After many long hours we have tried our best to compile many approaches and resources that we have seen work into an 80+ page whitepaper on "Driving Office 365 Adoption & Usage". It can be found at http://Office365Campaigns.com. Within it you will find all sorts of guidance - but in particular detailed guidance on how to actually improve and plan for adoption using adoption campaigns. Including how to define tips, contests, training, communication and more to effectively improve Office 365 adoption. That's not all. We realized that 80 pages weren't enough. So we also released a few supporting resources with EVEN more content and guidance. These additional resources are available in our “Office 365 Success” Resource Kit at http://Office365Resources.com. (Think of a zip file of various samples and guides - with many more to come). Quiz Contest Samples & Guidance For Office 365 - Running a quiz contest can help improve organizational understanding, awareness, and readiness around Office 365. This resource contains a sample quiz and additional quiz questions for Office 365. Contests, Challenges & Ideas For Office 365 - Running contests or challenges can help reinforce the tips you communicate in adoption campaigns. This resource contains a listing of sample contests and user challenges. Survey Sample & Guidance For Office 365 - Surveys can help improve organizational understanding, awareness, and readiness. They help provide insight based on participation of a targeted user group to improve the roll out of Office 365. This resource includes a few sample surveys and survey guidance. Office 365 Success Readiness Questionnaire - This questionnaire is designed to collect the information needed to support the construction of a governance plan and an adoption plan tailored for Office 365. What about the resources you use? What are some great ones we should add to the resources section of the whitepaper? What did we miss and what else should organizations know?Champion Community Content - December & January Calls
Hello everyone and thank you for attending our December and January community calls. Attached below is the content we used to drive both meetings for everyone to utilize. Additionally, here are the top links we discussed: Microsoft Service Adoption Specialist online course: https://aka.ms/AdoptionCert Microsoft Teams Adoption Flipbook: https://aka.ms/TeamsToolkit OneDrive Adoption Guidance: https://aka.ms/OneDriveAdoption SharePoint & Office365 Saturday worldwide events: http://www.spsevents.org/ Our next call focusing on training assets and tactics will be on February 20th. See you there!Working out loud in Silence (inspired by the MVP Summit silent disco)
If you haven’t been to a silent disco before, let me explain. There’s a dance floor. There are DJs, there are dancers, and … there are headphones. Bluetooth, over-the-ear headphones, brightly lit with colors and all tuned to one of several channels. The music you will hear, depends on the color your headphones are set to. On one channel, let’s say blue, the DJ will be playing “We are Family” by Sister Sledge, and on the green channel, they’ll be playing “Team” by Lorde, on the red channel is silence. As the night progresses, throngs of headphone-clad dancers fill the dance floor, dance and sing along, baffling those in the room who cannot hear the music as everyone outside of the headphone-clad is left wondering what they’re missing. [Photo above: everyone dancing on the dance floor. Most on green, but a few on blue. Photo credit: Benjamin Elias] I didn’t join the silent disco right away. You see, I was on crutches for the MVP Summit. So, I didn’t think it would be safe. One of my friends, Melanie Hohertz came up and said, “Here, try my headphones. I’ll get some more.” So I sat, far away from the dance floor, listening to the music and wishing I could be out there. [Pictured above: Becky Benishek and Loni French - Photo credit - Ragnar Heil] Then someone came back and said, “That woman in the wheelchair was on fire!” And that did it. That meant that if someone like me could do it, so could I. I stuck nearby my friends, so that in the case of insane jumping, I’d be safe – and we danced. My friend Loni French showed me (more than one time, because I couldn’t quite figure it out) how to switch from blue to green to hear different music. We encouraged each other to switch from channel to channel depending on song so that we could all sing together, or laugh together, and definitely DANCE together. [Pictured above: Amy Dolzine on blue and Loni French on green] To me, participating in the silent disco at the Microsoft MVP summit last week was kind of a beautiful metaphor of what we as Microsoft MVPs do. It's definitely something community managers do in enterprise social networks. A silent disco, in a way, is EXACTLY like working out loud. When you make your work visible to others, so that they can benefit from it you are working out loud. When you see others, who are just like you, participating in working like a network, you may dip your toe in. You get a feel for how powerful that is to know you may not have all the dance moves, but you know the people who do. You can all dance together on one channel, or move between channels seamlessly. You’ve built strong relationships from sharing what you know to benefit others and bringing people along with you to the dance floor. You can even bring NEW technology with you to your network or that silent disco. I brought crutches, and SnapChat, and was able to have my Bitmoji out there with my friend Noah Sparks. And Loni French, Kevin Crossman and I “closed our rings” on our Apple watches. And you know what, if you as a dancer just want to stick to the red “silent” channel and lurk [lurkers are people too], you’re still participating. You’re still out there on the floor, enjoying the event and being a part of it in your own way. [Pictured above: Amy Dolzine, Kevin Crossman, Ragnar Heil and Loni French on SnapChat, Amy Dolzine's Bitmoji dancing with Noah Sparks, Amy and Loni on Snapchat and our Apple watches] When you work out loud or you're in a silent disco, ANYONE can be a leader. If you wanna break dance, go for it. If you want to start a line dance, go for it. If you want to be the only one who moves to the blue channel and see who follows, you can do that. You wanna conga? Go right on ahead and bring your friends. I am part of a group of people who care very much about helping people connect with one another in a digital world. Digital transformation happens on screens, shop floors, factory floors, and as it turns out, on dance floors. As an Office Servers and Services Microsoft MVP, I, along with my friends all around the world, care about getting people to participate, to answer each other’s questions, to, in a word, DANCE with each other in a network. We want people to be aware of the technology, and also to adopt it to help them solve business problems with it and make it part of a shared experience that will lead to a greater sense of purpose, a sense of community, and trust. And now, I’d like to ask all of my fellow MVPs to reflect on this and let’s start a conga line of responses. Go on, comment, link to your own blogs. After all, "WE are YAMILY!" Cross posted from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/working-out-loud-silence-amy-dolzine/ Kevin Crossman Melanie Hohertz Lonya French Deleted Deleted Benjamin Elias Ragnar Heil noahsparksMicrosoft Ignite: Plan to drive value and user adoption in Microsoft Office 365
Greetings all! For those of you coming to Ignite, I hope to see you there at my session: "THR2003: Plan to drive value and user adoption with Office 365". We'll cover the top challenges to driving usage and practical things you can do to realize the value in your Office 365 investment. Drop me a question or a note if you have any comments or questions about this subject. I'd love to hear from you. See you in a couple weeks! Erik
Events
Join our next community call on March 25, 2025, to deep dive into the new features in SharePoint Pages and News, including flexible sections!
Host: Tiffany Lee
Guest: Katelyn Helms
Moderator:...
Online
Join our next community call on March 25, 2025, to deep dive into the new features in SharePoint Pages and News, including flexible sections!
Host: Tiffany Lee
Guest: Katelyn Helms
Moderator:...
Online
Recent Blogs
- Join our next community call on March 25, 2025. There were so many questions about the new features in SharePoint Pages and News, especially around flexible sections, that we're bringing a SharePoint...Mar 13, 2025
- Join our next community call on February 25, 2025, where we'll be diving into SharePoint sites and pages, as well as learning more about the new AI capabilities. In case you missed the announcement...Feb 19, 2025
