We don’t talk the talk, we walk the walk!
Our learning inspiration this month was Albert Einstein who said, ‘Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think’. We can learn many facts about what’s happening with technology change management, but we need to know how to train our minds to think how we apply the facts to our client’s problems.
Keeping on top of Microsoft developments is critical to what we do – we must learn the facts about what they’re up to and use them to improve our client’s technology experiences. So, what did Microsoft do this month and how is it going to help the organisations we work with?
Microsoft Teams turned two years old; and, over half a million organisations and 91% of the Fortune 100 companies are now using it. This transformational tool has turned our working lives around and we were delighted that new capabilities were launched to celebrate its birthday.
- You can now customise your background during a meeting with your company logo or an office environment screen saver to minimise background distractions.
- During a meeting, you can use your camera to capture, resize and refocus whiteboard images in real-time, so it’s easier for people who are working remotely to see them.
- Meetings now include subtitles and live captions to support the assistive technology community.
- Channel participation can be restricted without having to create a separate Team. There’s now greater control over disclosure of information to better manage conflicts of interest and ethical walls within an organisation. Plus, you can detect, protect and screen for sensitive information in chats and conversations.
- And, Live Events which hosts meetings for up to 10,000 people has been made generally available.
Whilst we’re talking Teams, we also learnt some nifty tips and tricks:
- You can funnel your customer feedback by integrating Twitter into Microsoft Teams. Set up an alert so when a customer tweets your handle or hashtag it flows directly into Teams, so you can share and respond immediately.
- From your mobile Microsoft Teams app, you can now communicate with each other in private chat and channel conversations using voice messages. You can record up to 15 minutes!
- Turbo charge agile working by integrating Jira into Microsoft Teams. It’s a seamless way to address workloads, bug resolution and app performance in real-time.
- Microsoft has launched a Teams tool kit, which includes real-world use cases and teamwork scenarios.
- You can add a Yammer tab to your Microsoft Teams channel that loads a specific group or topic feed from Yammer. Meaning you can follow and share conversations in Yammer without leaving Teams.
- You can use a Microsoft Flow template to automatically save Outlook email attachments to your OneDrive.
Windows 10 May 2019 updates have gone into preview and testing. The big change is that Microsoft is giving us back control. You’ll now be able to choose when you install the latest major version. So, you can stay on your existing version, receive the monthly security updates…and avoid the latest feature update.
Microsoft, LinkedIn and Adobe are partnering on a one-stop-shop lead generation solution. Use Adobe for advert creation and profiling, using its tools it acquired from Marketo. Leverage LinkedIn’s data to target the advert, then shift the data from interested prospects into Microsoft Dynamics (its CRM solution).
Want to keep learning about Microsoft Office 365? Jim Naroski covers what’s new every month in his YouTube Microsoft update.
And, that’s a wrap for April. Get in touch if you’d like us to feature specific Microsoft news in our monthly Microsoft blog posts.
