Office 365 planner

I was very excited to see Microsoft announce the Office 365 planner after rumours had abounded. You can read the Microsoft blog post here:

https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/introducing-office-365-planner/

Introducing Office 365 Planner 2

The reason I am excited (and should every IT Reseller) is that it offers yet another revenue stream opportunity. Why? It would be hard for me to find a I business that I deal with that doesn’t need some form of project management and need help doing just that.

Yes, you can do project management in SharePoint but SharePoint but be somewhat intimating for businesses still migrating from the old world of files and folders. A dedicated ‘planner’ app in Office 365 makes so much sense and open up so much opportunity.

What I also find interesting is the look as you can see from the above image taken from the Microsoft blog post. It looks very much like Delve, which I think is great. This is an indication of the direction Microsoft is heading with the whole Office 365 product. I wrote an article a while back about important I believe Delve is, which you can review here:

Delve should be the center of your Office 365 universe

Another point (and opportunity to note) is there is that every plan includes a OneNote notebook, much like Office 365 groups. I am a huge fan of OneNote and user it every day on every device I have. OneNote again is a huge opportunity got resellers to demonstrate how much productive customers can be if they start using OneNote in their business.

Although the Office 365 planner isn’t available yet, it will be soon along we a whole raft of updates and improvements. Office 365 just keeps getting better and better, for customers and resellers!

Enable the Power BI developer tools

if you want more control over the visualisation you can create in PowerBI take a look at the new developer tools.

You enable these by signing into your PowerBI environment and appending:

?devToolsEnabled=true

to the end of the URL.

The browser should refresh.

That will reveal a new menu option under the COG called Dev Tools.

A new tab will open and you’ll see the developer environment.

Take a look at the above video to see what’s involved in getting started with this environment.

A bit geeky I know and not for everyone but it should reinforce the point how important software (i.e. coding) skills are fast becoming. It should also highlight the opportunities that abound in this new environment and how easy it is to get started.

Hurry, price to rise soon

I am proud to say that the Cloud Business Blueprint community is fast approaching its second anniversary. I’d firstly like to take the opportunity to thank every existing Cloud Business Blueprint community member. Without you Cloud Business Blueprint wouldn’t be the success that it is.

Since it started out, we have kept adding more content for community members. The above screen shot shows you that we currently have over 150 videos available for community members to view on demand. That’s over 4.5GB of video footage available to help community members learn more about both the technical and business aspects of being a modern cloud provider.

But the information doesn’t stop there, we have a members forums where we answer both business and technical answers. It is place where other cloud resellers can share their challenges and help other members of the community through their experience.

Inside the Cloud Business Blueprint Community is also a raft of documentation, whitepapers and re-brandable content you can take and use with your own customers, all included in the monthly subscription price.

With all this success we are now looking to take the Cloud Business Blueprint community to the next level. This, combined with the significant amount of content that is now part of the community, means that we’ll soon be raising the entry price. However, if you subscribe before the price increase in November you’ll remain on the old rate for the life of your subscription.

Remember, there is no long term commitment, you can cancel at any time without question but I’m confident once you see all the content that is available and the new stuff that we are constantly adding you’ll realise how much time it is going to save you building your business and resolving technical issues.

You’d be hard pressed to find another dedicated environment like this that specifically brings together the best cloud providers from around the world and allows them to build their technical skills, business knowledge and share with others from all around the globe.

If you like the free content that I provide in various places and want to support the work that I do and gain access to the premium content I provide, then the Cloud Business Blueprint community is for you. Remember, join now to lock in the existing subscription price before he increase with no commitments. You can sign up today at:

http://www.cloudbusinessblueprint.com/members-sign-up/

I look forward to welcoming you inside the Cloud Business Blueprint community as we move into our third year.

Skill up or fade away. It’s that simple

One of the most common flaws I see with resellers and their cloud strategy is that they themselves simply don’t use the solutions they are attempting to sell their customers. That firstly limits their opportunities, secondly it limits their revenue and thirdly is raises questions in the clients mind (rightly or wrongly) as to whether they really know IT.

Let’s take Office 365 for example. Here SharePoint is clearly one of the most important pieces of the solution. SharePoint has been around since before 2000 and has been included will all versions of Small Business Server since 2003. Yet, most resellers literally have zero knowledge on the product. This lack of knowledge is exposed when they try and implement a product like Office 365 because SharePoint Teams Sites and OneDrive for Business are central to the Office 365 storage solution.

To truly understand a product like Office 365 you need to use it and use it as part of your business, every day. This of course means making an investment in learning and directly implementing the product. Yes, there may be other industry solutions out there that can solve a business need but can you re-bundle that specific product knowledge and sell it to clients? You can with SharePoint, Yammer, Skype for Business and so on.

Even if you don’t go the Office 365 route, what about products like Mailchimp, IFTTT, Evernote, Zapier, YouTube, Facebook, Bascamp and so on? The list is endless. Most IT Pros and resellers I come across are still wondering why paper flyers aren’t flooding them with business and are yet to implement social media for themselves. They are using the same technology they have been using for years because they are familiar with it, not because it makes them more productive, simple because it is what is familiar. In today’s exponential technological age that is a very dangerous place to be.

By experiencing the challenges in implementing and developing new solutions for yourself you get a much better understanding of how to craft something that can solves real world business problems, which In the end is what IT pros and resellers should be getting paid for. Simply buying an off the shelf, industry solution may improve your own business but it doesn’t expand any opportunity outside your business does it really? However, using something like SharePoint to solve an internal business challenge has an impact inside and outside the business because SharePoint is a now such a common platform.

Simply maintaining the IT status quo won’t cut it any more, IT pros and resellers have to be able to solve real business needs for their customers. In many cases this means implementing customised solutions, and that means development work. This may even mean some coding! Shock horror! However, the concept of the dominance of software in IT is not new, Marc Andreessen highlighted it back in 2011 when he wrote:

Why Software Is Eating The World

My observation is that this is where most IT Pros and resellers fall down, they don’t have the development skills. Yet a skill is something that can be learned, it is does not have any restrictions that prevents an IT Pro or reseller actually learning it, except in their own minds.

Cloud platforms like Office 365 provide a raft of tools for solving many business problems. However, they are not something that is just installed, they are tools to be used in crafting a solution. It is in this crafting that the real revenue opportunity lies, yet most IT Pros and resellers remain oblivious to this fact. Like the customers they support, they have the tools they need to solve their business challenges and generate additional revenue, yet many choose to ignore them because they are not willing to invest in the skills required. I’m not saying it doesn’t involve effort. I’m not saying it won’t be challenging. What I’m saying is that unless you are aiming to play in the high volume transaction game, you really don’t have any choice any more.

Therefore, because IT Pros and resellers are not skilling up on the platforms they are selling, their customers are using and discovering these same resources for themselves and building the required skills independent of their IT Pro or reseller. This is therefore fast relegating the IT Pro and resellers to work that is easily commoditised or automated, which in the end spells redundancy for them. Don’t believe in the ‘Uberisation’ of IT? Not doing so would be another fatal mistake.

Let me use you my own example here. Many IT Pros and resellers scoff at me when I tell then I use a spreadsheet to run the finances of my business, however that is because they assume that I’m using a spreadsheet in the same rudimentary manner they would (probably just summing up cells). They have no comprehension of the sophistication and automation that I have built into my financial spreadsheets. They have no comprehension of the advanced skills training that provides me in a product that is probably on the desktop of every business user. Those skills therefore give me the confidence, experience and opportunity to provide a raft of Excel services to customers for which I generate revenue. Sure, I could use an off the shelf accounting package but the opportunity benefits I deride from using Excel to an advanced level far outweigh and cost saving an accounting package may provide.

What you can achieve with Excel along is mind blowing but let me ask you, do you use Pivot Tables? Named ranges? Table lookups? Macros? I have found few who do and that’s therefore the opportunity I’ve identified I can fill and make money in the process. Now extend that opportunity out to products like SharePoint, Yammer, Power BI, Skype for Business and so on. The more I use each of these, the more I learn, the more I improve the way I do business but critically the more opportunity I have to resell those skills. Don’t even get me started on the Azure opportunities IT Pros and resellers are missing out on.

Most IT Pros and resellers have free access to all the products they provides to customers internally but yet few ever embrace them, yet alone implement them. In today’s fast paced markets this allows customers to surpass those who are supposed to know and once that happens, why do you need IT Pros and resellers? Simple, you don’t, and that’s what I see happening today.

Use it or lose it should be your mantra if you are an IT Pro or reseller. Skill up or fade away. It’s that simple.

Setting Partner of record in Office 365

A little while ago I wrote a post on how to set the partner of record in Office 365.

Since then, the Office 365 billing interface has changed so here’s an updated tutorial on how to set the partner of record in Office 365 tenant.

You’ll firstly need to login to the Office 365 web portal as an administrator with the appropriate rights.

Once you have logged onto the web console navigate to the Office 365 admin center using the app launcher. Towards the middle of this menu you will find a heading Billing which you will need to expand.

Below the Billing heading you should find an option Subscriptions which you need to select.

Now what actually appears here depends on what licenses you have in the Office 365 tenant but at first glance of the above screen shot the location to enter your partner of record is no very obvious. You may see a link in the lower right but in this case you don’t see anything.

You need to select the More Actions pull down in the top left as shown above. When you do this a menu will appear.

In this menu option you will find the option Add partner of record.

Selecting this will slide an options screen from the right hand side of the page as shown above.

You can then enter you Microsoft Partner ID in that field and select the Check ID button.

if you have completed all the partner pre-requisites you should see that your organisation has been located and is displayed in all green indicating everything is good.

You now need to go to the bottom of this slide and Save the changes and apply that partner to this tenant.

When you do that, administrators in the tenant will be sent a confirmation email like that shown above indicating that a new partner of record has been set.

Remember, what you see in the subscriptions area may vary depending on what licenses have been added to the tenant. Some licenses don’t support partner of record (i.e. Open). However, hopefully this makes it easy for you to set partner of record on those subscriptions that support it so you can start receiving commissions.

September Ask Us Webinar

My free Cloud Business Blueprint Ask US Webinar is scheduled for Thursday the 17th of September at 12.30pm Sydney Australia time. You can register at:

http://www.cloudbusinessblueprint.com/ask-weekly-webinar

In the webinar I give you an update on the state of play in the cloud and particularly what’s happening in the Office 365 and Microsoft world and then I throw open the floor for questions.

Last month there were some great questions around the different Office 365 plans and Windows 10 integration. The best part of the webinar is that, in most cases, I can demo or show the solution directly on the screen so everyone can see exactly. That can be really handy if you have been struggling to find how to do something.

The other good things for Cloud Business Blueprint Community members is that the webinars are recorded and available on demand inside the Cloud Business Blueprint forums. The webinars are free for anyone to attend live but to gain access to an on demand recording you’ll need to join me in the Cloud Business Blueprint Community.

We run these events every month and welcome any questions you have. If you can’t make it on the day feel free to ship through any questions to info@cloudbusinessblueprint.com or just leave a comment on this article.

I hope to see you at the event.

Using the SharePoint Online Term Store

One of the benefits that SharePoint provides is the ability to ‘tag’ information using metadata. This can greatly reduce the structure you use, especially when it comes to documents. Thus, instead of creating a deep and complex folder structure you use metadata to tag the files into the same categories as you would typically use for folders. Doing so make navigation and searching much easier.

The easiest way to achieve this to simply add a column to the location in a SharePoint site as the above video of mine demonstrates.

The draw back to this is that column is only available in that SharePoint item, it can’t be used in other lists and libraries.

The next option is to create a Site Column, which is exactly the same as an individual list column EXCEPT it can be used anywhere throughout the whole SharePoint site. I’ll cover that in another blog because I want to focus on a solution that is even more available and powerful than Site Columns.

The Term Store provides you the ability to have nested metadata fields across every SharePoint Site you are using. As you can see from the above screen shot, the Term Store is not just a one dimensional list like an added column is, it is hierarchical.

You get to the Term Store but logging into the Office 365 web portal as an administrator and then navigating to the SharePoint admin center. Then, from the menu on the left, you should see a option term store. When you select that, you should see the screen shown above.

Like many things in Office 365 no user has the ability to edit the Term Store, so the first thing you need to do is add your user details to the Term Store Administrators box in the lower right of the screen and save the changes.

If you don’t do that then you won’t be able to edit or add to the Term Store. You know you are able to do this when you hover over an entry and a small down arrow appears to the right. Selecting that arrow will then reveal a menu like that shown above.

The example that I’ll user here is creating a standard taxonomy (i.e. metadata structure) to cover locations (i.e. countries, states, cities, etc).

At the very top level of your Term Store, select the down arrow and from the menu that appears select New Group.

That will create a folder at the bottom of your. In this case give it the name, Locations.

Select the arrow to the right of this and then New Term Set from the menu that is displayed as shown above.

In this case I will call the New Term Store Country.

Keep repeating this process to build out the taxonomy (i.e. tagging structure you desire).

Now go into a item in SharePoint, in this case a Document Library. Add a column and when asked for the Column type select Managed Metadata at the bottom of the list of options, as shown above.

Scroll down the page and locate the Term Set Settings area. You should now see the hierarchy you saw in the SharePoint admin center.

You can now expand the structure and locate the term to select the place to start the selections for that field from. Here I have selected Australia so I get all the states below this only.

Now if you edit the properties of an item in that list you will see the new field and a tag icon to the right indicating that it is using managed metadata.

This is where it gets cool. If I type n.s.w. in it gets rejected. Although n.s.w. is ‘correct’ as value for the state it isn’t in the format we defined in our taxonomy, so it is unacceptable. This can ensure that the data that is entered into SharePoint is consistent.

If I however start typing the name of a state I am automatically prompted with the correct value. I just need to click on the suggested entry to complete.

Alternatively, if I select the two tags to the right of the selection field I am given a view of my hierarchy from the initial location I selected previously when creating the column.

Again, all I need to is select the option I want from the list.

Now you’ll see the file has been tagged appropriately for with a location as shown above. I can sort and filter as I normally would on this field inside the SharePoint list.

If I now for example change the term from NSW to N.S.W.

I see the term has also changed for that document.

Hopefully this article gives you some idea of the power of the SharePoint Term Store and managed metadata. There is so much more you can do with the Term Store than I have been able to show here, so I encourage you to go and do some exploring and see how the Term Store can be used to create flatter and more organised structures in your SharePoint Online environment.