Revised bootcamp notes publication now available

As I detailed a while back I have now updated my Bootcamp products offering to include:

1. Latest version of my Office 365 bootcamp notes. This OneNote notebook is something I use everyday to capture information about Office 365. It is my reference ‘bible’ covering everything from Exchange to Sharepoint, Delve to Single Sign on as well as troubleshooting, best practices and a range of PowerShell scripts and third party solutions that work with Office 365.

2. Latest version of my Azure bootcamp notes. This OneNote notebook contains my daily brain dump about Azure. It contains links, information, tutorials and more. Again, this is something I use everyday and update constantly.

3. Exam cram notes for the Office 365 70-347 and 70-346 exam. It contains information and links to help you pass the exam. It also has a number of practice exam questions to give you an idea of what might be covered in an exam.

4. Five (5) supporting Office 365 checklists and templates that you can use for your Office 365 implementation. These documents are in various Office formats (Word, Excel, etc).

There are two ways to get access to this material:

1. You can join my Cloud Business Blueprint community via:

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

where you’ll get immediate access to the latest versions plus heaps of other unique on demand training, cheat sheets, re-brandable content, articles AND access to the members forums to converse with other cloud resellers.

2. You can purchase the existing Office 365 bootcamp notes via;

http://www.e-junkie.com/ciaops/product/488325.php

for AU $148. This purchase will also entitle you to a 12 monthly subscription for updates to these products (generally updated monthly).

Also, given that the 74-325 Office for SMB exam has been superseded I have made the OneNote exam cram notes I created for this available for free download with all my other free material at:

http://www.ciaops.com/downloads

If nothing else, those bootcamp notes are going to provide a centralised and searchable way to locate just about anything to do with Office 365 and Azure. This will save you inordinate amounts of time and easily pay for your outlay. You’ll also get free updates for to all of these for 12 months once you purchase. Like I said, I use these notebooks EVERY DAY.

If you want some testimonials about these bootcamps and information provided visit:

http://www.ciaops.com/bootcamp/

Please support this material so I can continue creating more.

Blogging comes to Delve

The more I see of Delve in Office 365 the more excited I become. Why? Firstly, Delve is HUGE point of differentiation between Microsoft and its competition. Secondly, it provides powerful yet simple insights for average users into the vast array of information sources they have in Office 365. Delve quickly integrates information from SharePoint, OneDrive, Email, Yammer and more in a single pane of glass and prioritises that based on your interactions. It also allows you to not only view your Delve but the Delve of others in your team to see what they are up to.

Delve is also become the central location for information about you in Office 365. It contains your profile information, who you are and what you do in the business. One of the options that you can now incorporate in your Delve profile, as you can see above is a blog. This new Delve blog features replaces the old one from SharePoint and provide a much easier way of creating and sharing your thoughts.

When you select the Start Writing link, Office 365 will take a minute or two to set up your blogging platform. From what I can see it creates this a dedicated SharePoint Site Collection at:

https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/portals/hub/loginname

In a short order of time your blogging platform is read and you can create your first post. The editing platform is currently very simple (which is great) and very, very reminiscent of the new Office product, Sway (also coming to Office 365 soon). The easier it is, the more likely people will use it. All editing is now done directly in the browser (or the mobile app).

You basically create a title and add a banner. Then you type some text for the body as well as featuring a document from SharePoint that is embedded in your post if desired. This potentially allows you to use more detailed formatting if you need. This is great since if you wanted to be really visual you’d include a PowerPoint or potentially a Sway when it come to Office 365.

You then Publish the post when you are ready and there you have your first blog article.

Posts will now show up in your Delve activity feed, as seen above, that will also be made available to others in your team via the magic of the Officegraph technology that is powering Delve.

One of the big advantages of Delve is that you will be able to blog on the go using the mobile Delve app. As yet I can’t see how to do that just yet, but I know it is coming. So you can be out on the road, snap some pictures, write some text and get that up onto Delve to share with your team. Magic!

To my way of thinking Delve is becoming such an important part of Office 365 because it offers a gateway to unlock the vast treasure trove of information and value that a business creates around all Office 365 services. Having all of that surfaced quickly and automatically for users based on its relevance to them is a huge boost to productivity and collaboration that has never before been available. Combine that with the ability to consume and create content on a mobile device demonstrates to me that Microsoft really does get the concepts of the new way of working, that is social and mobile.

My questions to you however are, do you get it? Are you using Delve for increased productivity? If not why? Delve is the key that unlocks all the power that the complete Office 365 product brings to a business and it is only going to improve. Embrace the new way of working today with Delve.

Delve apps released

Microsoft has released mobile Delve apps for Android and iOS. These apps allow you to view your Office 365 Delve information on the go.

Delve is an Office 365 technology that surfaces relevant information based on your interactions with others in you business and Office 365 services like SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Yammer and so on. It uses signals created these to determine what is the most relevant information to you.

If you want to know more about what Delve is take a look at my previous post:

Delve rolling out now

Unfortunately, it seems that here in Australia we’ll need to wait a few weeks before we can use the apps as the roll out is only in the US at the moment but is coming to other countries ‘soon’.

The Delve service has also added the ability to ‘blog’:

“The new tool allows you to both edit and view pages from your mobile device, auto-saving as you go. It also provides the ability to post pages directly to Yammer, automatically creating friendly, readable URLs. And because it’s integrated across Office 365, it’s easy to embed documents inline from OneDrive for Business, videos from Office 365 Video, even photos from your desktop. And finally, it’s fast, modern and ready-to-go.”

You can read the full Microsoft announcement here:

http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-releases-office-delve-mobile-apps-for-android-and-iphone-windows-universal-app-coming-soon/

and

http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/14/new-office-delve-people-experiences-in-office-365/

Delve for the desktop?

Here’s an idea. What about Delve for the desktop to replace the current OneDrive for Business sync tool?

Delve uses the Officegraph technology to analyse ‘signals’ from your Office 365 interactions. Things such as browsing SharePoint sites, viewing documents, editing documents, sending documents, sending emails, etc are all combined and surfaced via the Delve tab in Office 365 in a layout much like Flipboard. The most popular items are displayed at the top of your Delve feed.

However, what if the Delve and Officegraph technology was used to determined what should be synced to your desktop automatically? I reckon that the stuff you work on most regularly, which will appear in Delve, is typically going to be the stuff you want to sync to your desktop. Wouldn’t be nice if that information could automatically be synced for you?

Imagine a world where you don’t continually need to either select what you want to sync or sync everything ‘just in case’. Imagine a world where the algorithm automatically looks at your interactions with files and people determining what should be synced to your desktop. Then, as you interact with things less they stop being synced to be replaced by more current items.

What about some sort of slider that you could set to determine the level of currency to sync? If you slide it to the left only the most current information is synced, while if you slide it to the left stuff that maybe less relevant is also synced. However, the bottom line is that Delve watches what you do and only syncs the stuff you use.

What do you reckon? Am I onto something here? Love to hear what you think and maybe what else could be included in a Delve desktop client.