Using Office 365 to stay up to date

Here’s a way that I specifically use Office 365 to keep up to date with partner news from Microsoft.

As I have mentioned here previously, I have created an Office 365 Group in my tenant called ‘Marketing’. That gives me a range of services including a SharePoint Team Site, an email list, a plan and more. What it also gives me is a range of “connectors”.

What are connectors you may ask? They are basically a way for you to consume information from services outside the Office 365 Group. These services can be other Office 365 Services BUT they can also be third party services like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

The aim of the game here is ensure that I receive regular information from the Microsoft Australia Partner Blog which you can find here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/auspartners

You’ll notice that it does have a few follow options:

In this case, I want to get an RSS feed so I obtain the URL for that which is:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/auspartners/feed/

I now head over to my existing Office 365 Marketing Group and look for the connectors option.

You’ll find these over in the top right.

Here you’ll find heaps and heaps of different services you can connect to. I’ll select the RSS option via the appropriate Add button.

I’ll now simply complete the fields using the information I obtained previously from the actual site. I’ll also elect to only receive a daily digest update.

When complete, I select Save.

I receive an email confirming the connector has been set up correctly.

and I get my first digest summary. How easy was that?

Now because the information is being sent to an Office 365 I can have multiple members of that group who receive the same digest without them having to do anything.

We can even discuss this information directly in the Office 365 Group as you see above.

Now anyone in the group can search that whole Office 365 Group quickly and easily for information that is feeding in there from places like the source web site I just set up.

As you can see from the screen shots, I feed quite a few services into my Office 365 marketing group. Everything from Twitter, to Facebook, Mailchimp and now the Microsoft Partner Network blog site. Best of all? I did with a few clicks using the power of Office 365. Even better, I have even more services as part of this Office 365 Group I can call on (such as a SharePoint Team Site) to automate my marketing even further.