Congratulation to Harry Brelsford for now bringing Microsoft in a big way to the Office 365 Nation conference in October. Big news! Watch the above video to get all the details.

If you are an SMB Partner then you really should be planning to attend this focused business and technical conference right on the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

As I outlined in an earlier post:

I will be presenting a number of sessions but see the real value in the hall way networking that takes place. Now with Microsoft being directly involved and having people from the product team also there, I’ve even more excited to attend and so should you be.

You can still register at:

http://fall2015.smbnation.com/

as well as see all the details about the conference. If you are planning on attending then let me know as I’d love to catch up with people.

See you there.

Outlook on the web improvements

If you have a look at your Outlook on the web experience in office 365 you might notices some differences. Microsoft has introduced some changes to the interface as well as added new features.

If you now visit Outlook from your Office 365 web portal and select an email you will see a range of menu options now displayed across the top of the page.

You’ll also find new features inside the inbox including the ability to ‘pin’ messages to the top of the list.

A new option called Sweep allows you to more easily create rules to manage your inbox. You simply select the message to action on and the select the Sweep option from the menu across the top of the screen.

Not only do Sweep rules work like traditional inboxes rules but they also have the ability to run automatically if required keeping your inbox organized when you aren’t there or email are flowing in.

The full details about these changes can be found in a recent blog post from Microsoft:

New features coming to Outlook on the web

Which you should take a look at to see all the new features they are incorporating. Hopefully by now you should bee seeing these new features in your Outlook on web, if not, they will be rolling out to you soon.

Power BI achievement unlocked

I find that the best way to learn ‘stuff’ is to have an end goal in mind. Design a specific project, with specific outcomes rather than trying to ‘learn’ generically. Solving a problem using technology, I find, generally produces faster and better results because it provide focus.

Case in point. One of my ‘learning’ projects has been to get a report on the storage utilisation from a machine and then be able to display that in a dashboard tool that allows ad hoc querying and reporting on that information.

Luckily, Power BI has come to the rescue at the presentation end, the issue I had been struggling with was developing something to collect all the data. I had written a PowerShell script and imported the results it into Excel but hadn’t got much further.

Recently I came across the new:

Office IT Pro Deployment Script project

in there was a Check-DiskSpace project that basically used the new Excel 2016 graph types like TreeMap and Sunburst to graphically display data collected from the hard disk.

Inside the project was everything i needed, a PowerShell script to collect the raw data, an Excel spreadsheet to automatically pull the raw data into an Excel pivot table. All I needed to do now was save that data to a new clean spreadsheet and upload into Power BI.

Once the upload into Power BI was complete I was then able to not only view my data graphically but also use nature language querying to analyse it, all thanks Power BI.

The result is what you see in the screen show above. Sure it is simple but it has progressed me a long way along the path of turning this into an impressive integrated demonstration that I can show prospects. That is going to give them a much better idea of what Power BI can do for their business and potentially win me more consulting opportunities.

Sure there are easier ways to display hard usage BUT the aim of this was to firstly improve my knowledge of Power BI by solving a problem (CHECK) and at the same time come up with an end to end demonstration of how Power BI can produce valuable information from raw data (CHECK).

Thus, achievement unlocked and now I’m onto the next level.

Delve gets specific

I wrote a blog post recently that highlighted how Delve should be the center of your Office 365 universe. In essence, it is a single pane of glass across all your information sources. So instead of digging through your inbox, then documents, then social feeds you go to Delve and everything is presented in an order of its relevance to you automatically.

Microsoft has now added a new document type filter button when you visit the Me section of your Delve. When you select the Me link on the left you see your profile as shown above. However if you look on the right hand side you will see a new option I’m looking for.

If you select this you’ll be presented with a list of file types as shown above.

If for example select Excel then your Delve will be filtered to only show those file types as seen above.

This is a handy way to quickly locate the file type you are working using Delve. This new option is available now available to those on the first release program and will be rolled out to everyone else soon.

Are you going to Office 365 Nation?

Harry Brelsford has been running SMB reseller events for many years now. He continues this tradition with the Office 365 Nation event in Seattle from October 2 – 4, 2015 and you can get more details and register at:

http://fall2015.smbnation.com/

I have been lucky enough to again be selected to speak at the event this year. If you missed it, I also presented last year and here’s my summary of the whole event:

Review of office 365 Nation 2014

This year I’ll be presenting on a broad range of topics including:

– Office 365 Identity

– Yammer

– Office 365 Security and compliance

– Azure and Office 365 exam cram topics

– Office 365 for MAC

to name but a few. Chances are that I’ll also be doing a few impromptu sessions like I did last year.

But you know what the best thing about this event is? The networking. Catching up with peers and sharing experiences, gaining understanding and building relationships is something you can’t do as effectively in emails, social media or in forums.

I look forward to seeing everyone soon and if you aren’t registered then hop to it as I’m sure places are limited. Tell Harry I sent you.

Connecting Cortana to Office 365

Using speech to interact with technology is not only cool but it can also be very productive. It is generally much quicker to record a voice message than write something down or send an email. With that in mind, and the enhanced abilities of Cortana we are seeing in Windows 10, it make sense for all this to connect up to Office 365 as well.

To start with you are going to need to have a Windows 10 machine and Cortana already configured on your machine.

An Office 365 administrator will need to login to the admin center and select Cortana from under the Service Setting on the menu on the left. They will then need to ensure that Manage access for Cortana on the right is set to On.

On a Windows 10 machine with Cortana already configured simply click into the search box to ‘wake up’ Cortana. Doing so should reveal something like you see above.

If you now select the second icon under the hamburger menu on the left (i.e. the one under the Home icon) you should a list of configuration options for Cortana as shown above.

From here select the Connected Accounts option.

At the moment the only option that is available is Office 365 so select this and set it to On.

You should now see the option as On.

To actually use Cortana with your Office 365 information you’ll need to configure your Office 365 account in both the native Windows 10 email and calendar apps. You do this simply by adding the account and selecting the Office 365 option as shown above.

With all this connected up Cortana has access to your appointments and will prompt you when meetings are scheduled. You’ll also be able to make appointments and do other helpful things all thanks to the wonders of Cortana.

The power and integration of Cortana will continue to grow in both Windows 10 and Office 365, so remember this is still early days. However, I see speech as key technology going forward that is going to make using technology much easier for the average user. So jump on board today, configure Office 365 with Cortana and prepare for the future.

Ensuring external Skype for Business connectivity

I am big proponent of using tools like Skype for Business for improved business productivity. As such I encourage people to connect to with using my Skype for Business account of admin@ciaops365.com.

Why would I do that? My experience is generally that I get contacted via email in regards to some technical question. I then need to reply to get more details. The sender then replies again and I need to reply again and so it goes on, back and forth. This is very disruptive because it fragments getting a solution and the time required to resolve. The better method is to chat using Skype for Business and then potentially move into screen sharing so I can see exactly what is going on. I also have other tools like screen sharing and whiteboard available in Skype for Business. This generally means the issue gets resolved much faster and in a single session so I can focus on other things.

Unfortunately, what I have discovered is that many people who have Skype for Business via Office 365 don’t have ability to communicate with external parties enabled. Now having talked so many people through the process of enabling this it is time to do a blog post so I can simply point people in this direction in the future.

If you are having issues connecting to external parties with Skype for Business follow this procedure to ensure you have external communications enabled in your office 365 tenant.

From the menu options in the bottom left, under Admin, select the Skype for Business option as shown above.

In the Skype for Business admin center, select the organization option from the menu on the left.

From menu option across the top on the right select external communications.

If you want to be able to communicate with others outside your organisation that use Skype for Business quickly and easily best practice is to select the option On except for blocked domains in the external access area at the top of the page.

If you also want to be able to connect with consumer Skype users ensure you have check the option below this to Turn on communication with Skype users and users of other IM service providers.

Below this you can enter the domains you wish to block or allow depending your selection above. In my case I have nothing in there but if someone starts spamming me via Skype for Business I would add their domain here (you have been warned!).

Once you have made these change don’t forget to scroll right down to the bottom of the page and select the Save button to update your preferences.

Now you can add people from outside your organisation that are using Skype for Business as well as consumer Skype as you can see above. The designation External Network indicates they are Skype for Business users outside your own Office 365 environment.

If you change the external communications setting in the Skype for Business admin center it may take 15 – 30 minutes for these changes to flow through and allow you to connect with external parties, so be patient.

That hopefully makes it easy for you to configure your Office 365 tenant to make connections with other Office 365 and consumer Skype users. As I said, I encourage anyone to connect to me using Skype for Business (admin@ciaops365.com) and contact me directly.