How to present Office 365

I’m working on a new course for my online training academy that will give people a framework for successfully presenting Office 365 to prospects, clients and colleagues.

Having presented this material in face to face classroom sessions I was really looking to incorporate the “whiteboard” experience on screen. What I therefore decided to try was using the Windows 10 OneNote app on my Surface 3 along with the Surface pen to see how well it would work while obviusly recording the whole thing.

My trial attempt is shown above and I think it worked pretty well. Obviously, there will need to be some polishing done before I release the final version of the course material, which will also contain more tutorials on how to present each individual service such as Delve.

Have a look and let me know what you think at the rough draft of on screen “whiteboarding”. Also, if you have played with OneNote and a pen then I suggest you do as OneNote is a great hand notetaking tool as hopefully the video illustrates. Of course if you want to find out when the course on Presenting Office 365 becomes available then stay tuned here or sign up for free at my online academy:

www.ciaopsacademy.com

Moving a OneNote notebook to Office 365

In the last blog post I covered how to move a OneNote notebook to OneDrive consumer. Just to balance things up I’ve recorded the above video tutorial that show you how to move a OneNote notebook from SharePoint 2010 to OneDrive for Business on Office 365.

Basically the process is the same but the video show you how quick the move process actually is.

Office 365 Public Web Site

Office 365 Public Web Site—Robert Crane Docs.com

https://docs.com/d/embed/D25195043-3379-9126-7090-000334196040%7eMd4186d87-61d5-259a-4d26-00a8bd86cfff

Now that the Office 365 SharePoint Online Public Web Site ability has been deprecated I’ve open sourced the documentation I created on it which I have placed on my docs.com site which I have embedded above and made available for download:

https://doc.co/jHVy8o/YXM7NJ

I also did a video tutorial on the subject which you can find here:

As some older Office 365 tenants still have the ability to work with the public web site for a limited time, hopefully this information might be of use.

MVP for 2016

It is with a great deal of humility and pride that I can report that Microsoft has once again recognised my community contributions with its Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for 2016.

This is now my fifth consecutive award, which makes it extra special. This recognition is however not possible without the support of people who follow and support what I do, especially those that take the time to read this blog. To each and every one of you I say thanks.

I’ll be sure to continue to work hard to bring you information about Office 365 and Azure. However, all of that wouldn’t be possible without Microsoft making such great products and making them available to people like me. I look forward eagerly to what they’ll be bringing out in 2016. It is so exciting to be part of a revitalised Microsoft that is really firing on all cylinders with products like Azure, Office 365, Surface, Office, Windows 10 and so on. Very exciting indeed.

Being an MVP is great honour. Being part of a community of really smart and passionate technology people is truely inspiring and I hope to live up to their dedication and enthusiam. I congratulate all those who where also awarded the same MVP recognition today.

But again, I thank Microsoft for this honour and will work hard to live up top the expectations it sets in 2016.

Power BI adds Cortana integration

One of the regular Power BI demos that i do involves using the natural language query engine at the top of the dashboard. The above example is from a spreadsheet I uploaded to my Power BI environment that contains information about all the Olympic medal winners.

So if I now type total medals by country into the query Power BI automatically provides me with the visualisation as you see above.

But if I wake Cortana up by saying “hey cortana” and then asking “total gold medals australia by sport” you’ll see from above that it comes back with some Power BI suggestions.

If I now select one of these you’ll see that it pulls the information from that same spreadsheet I was just using in Power BI.

That now means Cortana is integrated with Power BI! Pretty cool eh? So how do you configure that?

The first step in the process is to integrate Office 365 and Cortana. I have detailed that previously at:

Connecting Cortana to Office 365

Next, you’ll need to go into the Power BI Dashboard for the data set you wish to integrate with Cortana.

Select the COG in the top right corner of the dashboard for the dataset and then the Settings option from the menu that appears.

Ensure you have the desired dataset selected on the left. Then on the right ensure option Enable Cortana to access this dataset is checked.

Now users who have access to that Power BI dataset and have Cortana enabled and linked to their Office 365 account can query data by voice or simply by typing into the search box.

Another REALLY impressive new features is Quick Insights. Here I’ll use the Chicago Crime Statistics spreadsheet that I’ve also uploaded into my Power BI environment.

Select the ellipse (three dots) to the right of the data source under the Datasets heading in the lower left of the Power BI screen.

From the menu that appears (shown above) select View Insights.

You’ll now see a list of discovered “insights” displayed as shown above. But how are these “insights’ generated?

Power BI’s new Quick Insights feature allows you to run a variety of analytical algorithms on your data to search for potential insights with the click of a mouse. Through a partnership with Microsoft Research, we’re honing a growing list of algorithms to discover and visualize correlations, outliers, trends, seasonality, change points in trends, and major factors within your data, automatically, within seconds.

It gets even more impressive than that as detailed here:

Announcing Power BI integration with Cortana and new ways to quickly find insights in your data

Aside from all the new cool Power BI stuff the integration with Cortana illustrates another benefit of the Microsoft platform and how services like Cortana are being integrated across everything!

This stuff just keeps getting better!

Power BI adds Bing content pack

Power BI is a free (yes the basic offering is free) tool from Microsoft that allows you to analyse and report on data from all sorts of sources. You can upload your own spreadsheet for analysis and you can use the built in contents packs as you see above.

Microsoft has just release the Bing content pack for Power BI allowing you to analyse search terms.

To configure, all you need to do is all the Bing content pack from the Data Sources option. You’ll then need to enter a search term you wish to track (here “Office 365”.

Then you’ll get a dashboard you can start configuring.

The only limitation at the moment for the Bing Content Pack is that it doesn’t support the natural language query that the other content packs do. Hopefully, that feature will be coming in the future because that would really be a killer addition.

In the mean time, if you haven’t had a look at Power BI head over to:

www.powerbi.com

and sign for a free account and start making your data visual.

OneDrive for Business expiration of share links now available

You should find, if not already then soon, that you can now set an expiry time on something you share from your OneDrive for Business as shown above.

This gives you much greater control over your files by being able to automatically revoke access to information after a certain number of days.

This ability is not yet available in SharePoint Team Sites but I would expect to appear there soon as well.

For more information on sharing files from your OneDrive for Business see:

Share documents or folders in Office 365