Tag Archives: Business Intelligence

Introducing Guest Access for Office 365 Groups

Sometimes you need to work closely with customers, partners, suppliers or consultants outside of your organization, and you need collaboration tools to make this possible. Today, we are pleased to announce the new guest access feature for Office 365 Groups—the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group.

We are rolling out guest access functionality in phases. Starting today, group owners can add guests to a group in Outlook on the web. Once added, guests receive a welcome email, are granted access to group files in SharePoint Online, begin receiving email messages and calendar invites sent to the group, and can access the group in Office on the web and the Outlook Groups mobile application. They also have automatic access to cloud-based file attachments. Guests have the option to leave the group at any time and visual indicators remind all members of guest participation in the group across all Outlook experiences.

Office Groups GIF

Guest access works for any email accounts including corporate and consumer domains (such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com). If the guest email identity is associated with a Microsoft account (such as Office 365 or Outlook.com accounts, for instance), the user is directed to a sign-in page to identify themselves. If the guest doesn’t have a Microsoft account, they will be directed to a sign-up page to create an account.

Trying to invite someone from outside your Outlook network to collaborate? Atidan can help! Email office365@atidan.com for more information.

Reference: https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/08/introducing-guest-access-for-office-365-groups/

4 Must-Haves in Setting Up a Business Email Like an IT Pro

Email haters, beware! A recent survey has proven that email is the top tool used for communication at work and will increase in importance during the next five years. The survey also showed that employees spend 3.2 hours each day checking work-related emails. A separate study by The Radicati Group declared that an average of 122 business emails were sent and received per user per day last year.

What does all this data mean? It’s a good reminder that email is, and will continue to be, a mission-critical application for any business—whether small or large. When setting up a business email solution, there are many factors to consider, especially if yours is a small or midsized company targeted to grow in the next few years.

Setting up a business email like an IT pro

To find the best email service for your business, only consider those that meet the following must-have criteria:

  1. Hosted email solution—There are two main options for business email setup: in-house and hosted email. For many businesses, the total cost of ownership related to in-house email does not make good financial sense. It might mean imposed storage limits, which are inconvenient to your employees, and it translates into your company being responsible for upgrades and backups.
    However, when you use a hosted email solution, email hosting services take the burden of operation from your IT team’s shoulders. Hosted email service for business users also can provide dynamic storage options and scale to meet your company where it is in its growth cycle.
  2. Adequate server space—Depending on how large your company is and how much email storage it needs, you will need to choose between shared and dedicated hosting. Many small companies start with shared hosting—which means your physical server is used by multiple tenants—because it is extremely affordable and still provides all the benefits of email hosting services, including security, reliability and privacy. When that shared server space is no longer enough, companies can scale up to dedicated email servers for business. There is often more customization available with a dedicated solution too.
  3. Mobile access—In today’s fast-paced business world, compatibility between your email solution and your workers’ mobile devices is crucial. Not only is it necessary for your employees to be able to access their business emails when away from their desks, it’s also important that you consider an email solution with mobile calendar and document sharing capabilities. In addition, make a selection that is consistently upgraded for mobile technology and allows for syncing with other devices.
  4. A solid provider—When selecting an email service for business purposes, the “who” is just as important as the “what.” Choose a company you can trust, with years of proven experience providing superb email hosting services. Specifically, look for a provider with a strong uptime guarantee, high reliability and fantastic security. The provider’s email solution should make your employees’ jobs easier, including features such as integration between the calendar, contacts and files; a shared calendar feature; and 24/7 support from experts.

It’s fairly evident that email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Organizations should take great care when setting up a business email solution in order to increase efficiency and have a positive effect on the bottom line.

Let Atidan help your business flourish in the email world. For more information, contact us at office365@atidan.com.

Reference: https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/08/4-must-haves-in-setting-up-a-business-email-like-an-it-pro/

Power BI publisher for Excel (Preview)

With Microsoft Power BI publisher for Excel, you can take snapshots of your most important insights in Excel, like PivotTables, Charts, and ranges and pin them to dashboards in Power BI.

What can you pin? Just about anything in an Excel worksheet. You can select a range of cells from a simple sheet or table, a PivotTable or PivotChart, illustrations and images, text. What you can’t pin: You cannot pin 3D Maps or visualizations in Power View sheets. There are also some elements you can pin, but it wouldn’t make much sense to, like a Slicer or Timeline filter.

When you pin an element from Excel, a new tile is added to a new or existing dashboard in Power BI. The new tile is a snapshot, so it’s not dynamic, but you can still update it. For example, if you make a change to a PivotTable or Chart you’ve already pinned, the dashboard tile in Power BI isn’t updated automatically, but you can still update your pinned elements by using Pin Manager. You’ll learn more about Pin Manager below.

Download and install

Power BI publisher for Excel is an add-in you can download and install on desktop versions of Microsoft Excel 2010 with SP1 and later.

Once you have the publisher installed, you’ll see a new Power BI ribbon in Excel, where you can sign-in and out of Power BI, pin elements to dashboards, and manage elements you’ve already pinned.

The Power BI publisher for Excel add-in is enabled by default, but if for some reason you don’t see the Power BI ribbon tab in Excel, you’ll need to enable it. Click File > Options > Add-ins > COM Add-ins. Select Microsoft Power BI publisher for Excel.

Pin a range to a dashboard

You can select any range of cells from your worksheet and pin a snapshot to any number of existing or new dashboards in Power BI.

  1. In your worksheet, select a range, and then click Pin. If you’re not already signed into Power BI, you’ll be prompted to.
  2. In Pin to dashboard, select an existing dashboard or create a new one, and then click Pin.

Pin a Chart to a dashboard

Just click on the chart, and then click Pin .

Manage pinned elements

With Pin Manager, you can update (refresh) a pinned element’s associated tile in Power BI. You can also remove the pin between an element you’ve already pinned to dashboards in Power BI.

To update tiles in your dashboard, in Pin Manager, select one or more elements and then click Update.

To remove the mapping between a pinned element in Excel and the associated tile in a dashboard, click Remove. When you click Remove, you’re not removing the element from your worksheet in Excel or deleting the associated tile in the dashboard. You are removing the pin, or mapping, between them. The element will no longer appear in Pin Manager. If you pin the element again, it will appear as a new tile.

To remove a pinned element (a tile) from a dashboard, you’ll need to do that in Power BI. In the tile you want to delete, click the Open menu icon and then click Delete tile .

Contact us for PowerBI information at office365@atidan.com

Blog post content credit to the Microsoft PowerBI team!

 

Microsoft Visio 2016 Launched – Work Visually

Atidan is pleased to offer the new Visio 2016, the industry-leading diagramming solution used by over 12 million users. Contact us visio@atidan.com for a free trial.

Visio 2016 makes it easier for everyone to define business processes, document best practices, visualize the future state of transformative initiatives and stay on top of operational insights. Using Office 365, you can share these Visio diagrams with everyone and communicate one version of the truth to drive organization-wide alignment.

Visio 2016 offers starter diagrams, hundreds of smart shapes, one-step data linking, Information Rights Management (IRM) for compliance and so much more. Working visually is now faster and easier than ever.

Get started quickly

When starting out, the new Visio offers a set of pre-crafted starter diagrams and contextual tips and tricks to help you easily create, edit and complete your diagram.

These quickly executable diagrams are available in 15 of the most popular domains (flowcharts, timelines, workflows, etc.) and will inspire and guide you from start to finish.

The new built-in Tell Me support helps you navigate more than 800 commands in Visio. Just ask Visio how to do something and the relevant commands are displayed in a simple drop-down list. You can execute the command just by clicking one of the options listed. Now even new users can leverage the full capabilities of Visio.

Be productive and compliant

Visio offers thousands of shapes that meet industry standards, including BPMN 2.0, UML 2.4 and IEEE (new). Whether you want to map out an IT network, build an org chart, document a business process, draw a modern floor plan or capture a flowchart from a whiteboard, the new Visio can help you work visually and stay compliant.

Here are some examples:

The new visio is here 3

One-stop process modeling.

The new visio is here 4 - cropped

Updated office layout template with modern style.

The new visio is here 5

IEEE-compliant electrical diagram.

Easily connect data to diagrams

With Visio, you can link diagrams to popular data sources such as Excel, Active Directory, SharePoint and SQL Server to display data on top of real-world visuals. For example, you could depict an assembly line in Visio and connect different components of that diagram to real-time operational data. Data-linked diagrams can update automatically and will display different icons, symbols and colors to reflect changes in the underlying data.

The Visio 2016 Quick Import capability now makes it easy for anyone to link data to real-world diagrams, plans and processes. With a single click, the new Visio can automatically identify the data source, import the data, link that data to shapes and apply data graphics. With one-step data linking, you can easily turn diagrams into dashboards and monitor progress or performance in real time.

Visio 2016 also makes it easy to swap out the graphics to your preference with a single click and make your data easily digestible.

Collaborate with confidence

More than ever before, our day-to-day work involves collaborating with others. This means sensitive information within diagrams requires new levels of protection. Visio 2016 now supports Information Rights Management (IRM) and lets you control document rights at the individual user level.

With Visio 2016 you can work visually, leverage data and protect sensitive information like never before. Experience the new Visio for yourself by starting your trial of Visio Pro by contacting the Atidan team at visio@atidan.com

Content from https://blogs.office.com/2015/10/01/the-new-visio-is-here-work-visually/

Microsoft Power BI Launched – Bring Your Data to Life

Atidan is pleased to be a part of the business intelligence revolution – for over ten years we have worked with powerful visualization tools starting with the early versions of SQL Server and many third party tools. Now, it is even easier than ever to collect data from almost ‘anywhere’, create ‘stories’ from your data, create insights with simple drag-and-drop gestures, and share your dashboards and metrics internally and externally. Contact us today to see the latest release of Microsoft Power BI.
Microsoft Power BI is a collection of online services and features that enables you to find and visualize data, share discoveries, and collaborate in intuitive new ways. There are two experiences now available for Power BI: the new experience, generally referred to as Power BI, and the previous experience which is referred to as Power BI for Office 365.Power BI

The new experience is centered on PowerBI.com, an online service where you can quickly create dashboards, share reports, and directly connect to (and incorporate) all the data that’s important to you. The new experience also introduces the Power BI Desktop, a dedicated report authoring tool that enables you to transform data, create powerful reports and visualizations, and easily publish to Power BI. The new experience extends to all your mobile devices, too.

Note   If you were using the previous experience and want to migrate to the new experience, you can download this migration guide to understand and prepare for the migration process.

The following sections provide an overview of the new experience, along with introductions and links to learn more about the details and capabilities of each offering.

Power BI – the new experience

In the new experience, Power BI displays dashboards on the Power BI service that are interactive, and can be created and updated from many different data sources. Three elements are primary to the new experience:

In the new experience, you create dashboards that keep you informed about what’s most important about your business. Just like a dashboard in your car displays important information about your vehicle, such as its speed, its fuel level, or how healthy the engine is, dashboard in Power BI display important information about your business.

Dashboard in Power BIIn Power BI, dashboards display tiles that represent important information about your business. Tiles are based on reports (just like gauges are based on vehicle data from the engine, the fuel tank, or the battery). You can select a tile to explore more information from the underlying report.

Power BI - dashboard to reportThe new experience also introduces a dedicated report authoring tool:

With Power BI Desktop, you get a powerful and dedicated report authoring tool that enables you to connect to and combine data from lots of different sources, using Power BI Desktop’s Query Editor. From the datasets you build with Query Editor you can create rich reports and visualization within Power BI Desktop. And when you’re done, publishing to the Power BI service is easy.

Power BI DesktopThere’s a lot more to learn about the new experience, and plenty of content to help you . The following links provide information about the new experience, and start with overview information (to get your familiar, oriented, and comfortable) then move into specifics. A separate section is dedicated to the Power BI Desktop, and those links also go from overview to specifics.

Getting Started – the new experience

The following links provide guidance on the new experience in Power BI.

Using Power BI Desktop

The following links start with an overview of Power BI Desktop, then describe common tasks and capabilities that Power BI Desktop provides.

Financial Process, Approvals & Security with Nintex Workflow & Forms for SharePoint

Join Atidan to see how Nintex Workflow, Nintex Forms and Microsoft SharePoint will support your critical business processes including financial approvals, security, compliance, monitoring and overall enterprise collaboration with SharePoint.
Thursday June 12th, 2014 – 11AM EDT
During this 45 minute live demonstration, we will demonstrate features including:
  • Multi-level approvals
  • Two layer authentication
  • Workflow metrics & history
  • Visualizations of process metrics
  • How to quickly change workflows and process
  • Mobile forms
  • Branded SharePoint Enterprise portal with multiple roles and personalization
  • Advanced Search
  • And much more

All attendees will get a chance to ask questions, see live process development, and receive a free trial offer!

Microsoft Power BI Business Intelligence for Office 365 – 40% Subscription Discount Offer

Microsoft’s Power BI or Business Intelligence for Office 365 is now out of Alpha testing and for subscribers of Office 365, we are offering subscriptions at 40% off until June 30, 2014 for E3/E4 subscribers.  Contact Atidan for demonstration, demo accounts and additional information.  Text below is copied from Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/default.aspx#fbid=gzgsPZaTNLd 

Power BI consists of the following features and services:

Excel Features

  • Power Query – easily discover and connect to data from public and corporate data sources
  • Power Pivot – create a sophisticated Data Model directly in Excel
  • Power View – create reports and analytical views with interactive data visualizations
  • Power Map – explore and navigate geospatial data on a 3D map experience in Excel

Power BI for Office 365

  • Power BI Sites – share, view, and interact with reports in these collaborative Power BI sites
  • Power BI Q&A – use natural language queries to find, explore, and report over your data
  • Query and Data Management – share and manage queries and data sources, and view query usage analytics
  • Power BI Windows Store App – view reports on the go, with the Power BI app

IT Infrastructure Services for Power BI

  • Provision Power BI for Office 365 – create a tenant, and get Power BI for your organization
  • Power BI Admin Center – manage your organization’s Power BI infrastructure from a site
  • Data Management Gateway – connect on-premises data to the cloud, seamlessly and securely

 

 
Choose the right option based on what you already own:
 
If you own a subscription to Office 365 E3 or E4 plans you have access to SharePoint Online Plan 2 and Excel and require the following additional components:
If you subscribe to Office 365 ProPlus, or own a license of Office 2013 Professional Plus, you require the following additional components:
If you do not currently have access to SharePoint Online Plan 2 and the latest version of Excel you will need the following:
 

Power BI

Add-on for E3/E4 Subscribers

Power BI

Standalone

Power BI

Standalone + Office 365 ProPlus
Price

$33 $20* user/month

(billed annually $396 $240/year)

Preview Sign up

$40 user/month

(billed annually $480/year)

Preview Sign up

$52 user/month

(billed annually $624/year)

Preview Sign up

Power BI Office 365
BI Sites
Scheduled Data Refresh
Enterprise Data Search
Data Stewardship
Mobile BI
SharePoint Online Plan 2  
Excel      
Data Discovery & Access    
Data Modeling    
Data Visualization    

* 40% off promotion for Office 365 E3 or E4 customers. Offered through June 30 2014. Pricing Shown is US Commercial ERP through the Microsoft Online Subscription Program

 

Updates to Power BI for Office 365 – From Microsoft BI Team Blog

One Step Closer to Simplifying Data Analysis and Visualization, New Features Added to Power BI for Office 365 and Power Query Add-in for Excel Preview

13 Dec 2013 9:00 AM

Today we’re pleased to announce the addition of significant new features to both the Power BI for Office 365 and the Power Query add-in for Excel previews. Introduced in July and currently in preview, Power BI for Office 365 is a cloud based solution that reduces the barriers to deploying a self-service Business Intelligence environment for sharing live Excel based reports and data queries as well as new features that enable data discovery and information access from anywhere and from any device.

One of the Power BI features users have been most interested in is Q&A, which takes data exploration to a whole new level. With Q&A, users type ad-hoc questions and the system provides them with answers in the form of interactive charts and graphs.  The search like experience is instantaneous and uses natural language query, interpreting the semantics of question the user is typing. We’ve received great responses from customers who have tested this capability on the preview sample data. Today we enable the ability to explore your own data with Q&A. You can add your own models to Q&A and begin to explore them with natural language query.  

Try Q&A today by uploading your workbook to your Power BI Site. Do this by clicking on the add link and selecting “Upload file”. This will upload and enable your workbook for use in the Power BI site. 

 

After your workbook has been enabled, click on the three dots on the thumbnail for your workbook and select “Add to Q&A”: 

 

One you’ve completed these steps you can navigate to the Q&A question by clicking the “Search with Power BI Q&A” link in the upper right hand corner of your Power BI site: 

 

Also, keeping in line with our goal to make Excel the only tool you need for data analysis and visualization, we are also excited to announce updates to the Power Query add-in for Excel preview, introducing new data source support and usability enhancements.

Connectivity to New Data Sources

  • Exchange: We add support for connecting to your Microsoft Exchange account and retrieving information about your Mail, Calendar, People, Tasks and Meeting Requests.
  • Dynamics CRM Online: We enhance Power Query’s OData support to consume OData feeds from Dynamics CRM Online.
  • JSON light support: We enabled consumption of JSON light OData feeds via the “From OData” experience.
  • Sybase IQ: We add Sybase IQ to our list of supported databases.

Below is an example of a simple visualization created by connecting to your exchange account.

  

Automatic Detection of table relationships:

  • Last month we improved how you connect to databases by providing navigation to the list of databases and tables and providing import of multiple tables. This month we add relationship detection between these tables automatically creating the relationships in the model for you.

 Transformations in the Query Editor:

  • New additions to the Query Editor ribbon include:
    • Number Transformations: If you have used the “Transform” menu in the ribbon or context menus, you will have noticed transformations for Text and Date/Time/Timezone columns. In this update, we have added new transformations that can be applied to Number columns.
    • Fill Down: You can now use the “Fill Down” button in the ribbon to fill values down within the selected column(s), filling empty cells in the column with the value of the first non-empty cell above them.
    • Sort Ascending/Descending: Easily define a sort criteria for selected column(s) by using Sort Ascending/Descending buttons in the ribbon.

 

Improvements to Search:

  • Search for Certified results: Last month we introduced Certified Shared Queries. We now add an option to the Search ribbon to allow you to narrow your search to only certified results if you choose.
  • Enabling copy of Name and Description on Search results: We thank you for your preview feedback! A consistent request has been for the ability to copy the name and description of a Search result into your clipboard. This is now possible by right-clicking on these two fields in the Search results fly-outs.

Finally, the Power BI team is excited to announce the launch of our updated website www.powerbi.com. The new site has a fresh new look and was designed with you in mind.

 

Here’s a quick look at what’s different:

  • New user-friendly navigation
  • Easy access to the Power BI blog
  • New support sections
  • New content about features
  • New social and sharing capabilities

We hope that you enjoy these new features and usability improvements. Don’t hesitate to let us know your thoughts through the forums and through the Smile/Frown feature. 

Helpful links:

Let Atidan Deliver a Customized SharePoint Roadmap for your organization:

Let Atidan Deliver a Customized SharePoint Roadmap for your organization:

 

New Deployments

Content Management

Search P.O.C.

Upgrades

Web P.O.C.

Business Intelligence P.O.C

Internet & Extranets

Social P.O.C.

SharePoint Apps

Planning Services

What is ‘SDPS’ and Why Atidan?

 

SDPS Answers your questions about SharePoint:

Atidan delivers expert advice and personalized service based on your unique needs and environment. We compliment your strategic business direction and ensure that you have the best deployment or upgrade plan possible.

 

Get more value from your Microsoft Software Assurance (SA) investment:

This benefit is available at five levels: 1, 3, 5, 10, and 15-day engagement plans that are best aligned for your organization’s size. If you have SDPS vouchers, Microsoft will pay for your SDPS engagement with Atidan.

 

Receive SharePoint best practices and tools from Atidan and Microsoft:

 

Atidan leverages best practices for SharePoint deployment by analyzing the customer environment and providing tools and technologies that help customers manage SharePoint implementation and manage the migration of data.

              

Three Core SharePoint Deployment Offerings

1. SharePoint Deployment Planning

The SharePoint Deployment Planning offer helps you to plan an effective deployment of Microsoft SharePoint for your organization. Through this offer you will receive a comprehensive introduction, understanding, and customized roadmap for leveraging the SharePoint platform to transform your content management, collaboration, and search strategy to better drive your business initiatives.

What you get…

An integrated deployment plan that can help lower costs, optimize business productivity infrastructure and create a secure and well-managed collaborative infrastructure that supports the key capabilities of SharePoint including:

  • Social
  • Mobile
  • Business Intelligence
  • Process
  • Search
  • Content management

 

2. SharePoint Upgrade Planning

The SharePoint Upgrade Planning offer helps you to discover the value of upgrading and provides you with a customized migration plan for leveraging the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web. This offer is designed for customers who have already deployed earlier versions of SharePoint.

What you get…

  • A comprehensive introduction to SharePoint 2013
  • A thorough understanding of the upgrade process as it relates to your deployment
  • Awareness of the upgrade “costs” and benefits (immediate / future)
  • A customized migration plan for deployed workloads

 

3. SharePoint for Internet & Extranet Sites Planning

The SharePoint Internet Sites Planning offer provides you with a unified solution for managing your Web Content lifecycle. SharePoint provides a single platform that brings end-to-end capabilities like structured publishing (WCM), social computing (blogs, wikis, discussions, ratings, tagging, comments), search, personalization, commerce, and advertising together to your intranet, extranet, and Internet sites to create a differentiated, engaging customer experience that will drive loyalty and repeat traffic to your site.

 

What you get…

A customized plan for deploying a unified solution for managing your Web Content lifecycle. Leveraging SharePoint allows you to:

  • Establish an Enterprise Platform for your Web Content Management
  • Increase IT Manageability and Efficiency of your Web Solutions
  • Simplify your Content Publication Lifecycle
  • Integrate and Extend your WCM Solutions

Six New SharePoint POC Offerings

 

4. Enterprise Content Management POC

 

SharePoint 2013 delivers core content management capabilities in a single, extensible platform. These capabilities are central to the SharePoint platform and provide a consistent approach to managing traditional content (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF), Web content, and social content (blogs, wikis). By taking an integrated approach to Enterprise Content Management (ECM), SharePoint 2013 can reduce the need to maintain multiple systems and develop costly integration solutions.

The eDiscovery functionality in SharePoint Server 2013 provides improved ways to help you protect your business including eDiscovery queries across multiple SharePoint farms and Exchange servers, non-disruptive in-place preservation of documents and email, and support for exporting those documents and email messages. Atidan’s Planning & POC will address these core topics:

  • Social Interaction
  • Document Set Management
  • eDiscovery
  • Records Center
  • Enterprise MetaData Management
  • Search Visualization

5.  Web Content Management POC

Web content management is a better experience in SharePoint Server 2013. Not only can content authors cut and paste content directly from Word and have the resulting semantically correct HTML markup display in the styles that were defined by the site designer, but site owners and designers can now customize the global and current navigation menus by dragging and dropping menu items directly on the page.

There are many new features that improve video and image handling, as well as inserting page external components via iframes using industry standard web development.  Other powerful new features in SharePoint Server 2013 include Topic Pages for easily managing and presenting catalog information, tight integration with the native search engine and improved multi-lingual support. In addition, SharePoint 2013 supports many new mobile computing capabilities like device channels to target content to specific display platforms, a new geolocation data type and push notifications.  Atidan’s Planning and POC will address:

  • Easy Content Authoring & Management              Managed Navigation
  • Targeted User Experiences                                 Content Re-Use
  • Search As Content Provider                                Multi-Lingual Support

 

6. Business Intelligence POC

Business intelligence (BI) in SharePoint 2013 provides comprehensive BI tools that integrate across Microsoft Office applications and other Microsoft technologies.

These BI tools are: Excel 2013, Excel Services in SharePoint 2013, PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2013, Visio Services in SharePoint, SharePoint 2013, and Microsoft SQL Server. Atidan’s Planning and POC will address:

  • Excel & Excel Services
  • Powerview and PowerPivot
  • Visio Services
  • Performance Point Services
  • SQL Reporting Services with SharePoint Integration

 

7.  Social POC

Social computing isn’t just a new set of tools – it’s a new way of thinking about organizations.  It’s about putting people at the center of the organization and ensuring that customers, employees, partners can connect with the people and information that they need to actually get their work done.

The social computing and collaboration features in SharePoint Server 2013 and Yammer offer an improved administration and user experience, in addition to new functionality for enterprise users to share and collaborate with others in their organization. The introduction of Community Sites offers a forum experience to categorize discussions around subject areas, and connect users who have knowledge or seek knowledge about subject areas. Improvements to My Sites offer a more intuitive workflow for users to develop their personal profiles, store content, and keep up-to-date with activities of interest. Atidan’s Planning and POC will focus on:

  • Yammer
  • Personal Sites
  • Team & Project Sites
  • Communities
  • Integration

 

8. Search POC

Search in SharePoint Server 2013 is a single unified platform that combines an integrated, easy-to-manage query and data integration platform with native integration of the best-of-breed core enterprise search technology to give users the ability to find the content, information, and people they need.

New Search features in SharePoint Server 2013 make it easier for you to locate more relevant information and find colleagues quickly and efficiently.  And now, user behavior influences the relevance of documents, bringing more popular results to the top of the list over time.  Other key improvements include search UI changes that allow you to look into the search results with a simple roll-over instead of having to click into the document, as well as powerful new ways to process Query Rules and Results Sets.

9. SharePoint Apps Planning

The new apps model for SharePoint provides a new method to deliver specific information or functionality to a SharePoint site.  An app for SharePoint is a small, easy-to-use, stand-alone app that solves a specific end-user or business need. Site owners can discover and download apps for SharePoint from a public SharePoint Store or from their organization’s internal App Catalog and install them on their SharePoint sites. These apps for SharePoint integrate the best of the web with SharePoint 2013. They do not replace SharePoint features and solution packages, which customize or enhance SharePoint sites.

Unlike features and solutions, which farm or site collection administrators have to install, apps for SharePoint are stand-alone applications that owners of sites can add to their SharePoint sites. The apps for SharePoint have a simple lifecycle – they can be installed, upgraded, and uninstalled by site owners. Atidan’s Planning engagement will focus on:

  • The new Apps model
  • Business Connectivity Services
 

Atidan customizes every planning and proof-of-concept engagement to meet our client needs.

 

Contact us for a personalized briefing and project review.

Gartner Outlines 10 IT Trends To Watch

Gartner Inc. offered a glimpse of 10 trends for IT professionals to pay attention to over the next five years.

The trends were discussed in a Thursday Webinar by David J. Cappuccio, a research vice president at Gartner. He noted that IT pros are busy enough with daily operations, with “74 percent” of IT budgets devoted to those concerns. Still, he contended that there are lots of new technologies and trends that will have an impact on IT departments.

From Redmond Magazine – http://redmondmag.com/home.aspx 

Gartner expects these trends will affect IT over the next five years:

  1. “Software-defined networks
  2. “Software-defined storage
  3. “Hybrid cloud services
  4. “Integrated systems
  5. “Applications acceleration
  6. “The Internet of things
  7. “Open Compute Project
  8. “Intelligent datacenters
  9. “IT demand
  10. “Organizational entrenchment and disruptions”

End user expectations are affecting IT. New workers getting out of college are expecting access to everything all of the time, from any device, from anywhere, Cappuccio said. They typically own between three and four devices today, he added.

http://redmondmag.com/Articles/2013/10/03/10-IT-Trends.aspx?Page=1