Tag Archives: Social

Introducing Microsoft Teams—the Chat-Based Workspace in Office 365

Microsoft just announced Microsoft Teams—the new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Microsoft Teams is an entirely new experience that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365 global, secure cloud. Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available in preview in 181 countries and in 18 languages to commercial customers with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2017.

At Microsoft, we are deeply committed to the mission of helping people and organizations achieve more—and reinventing productivity for the cloud and mobile world is core to our ambition. We built Microsoft Teams because we see both tremendous opportunity and tremendous change in how people and teams get work done. Teams are now more agile and organizational structures more flat to keep communications and information flowing. With Microsoft Teams, we aspire to create a more open, digital environment that makes work visible, integrated and accessible—across the team—so everyone can stay in the know.

Microsoft Teams delivers on four core promises to create a digital workspace for high performing teams.

Chat for today’s teams

First and foremost, Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversation experience for today’s teams. Microsoft Teams supports not only persistent but also threaded chats to keep everyone engaged. Team conversations are, by default, visible to the entire team, but there is of course the ability for private discussions. Skype is deeply integrated, so teams can participate in voice and video conferences. And everyone can add personality to their digital workspace with emojis, stickers, GIFs and custom memes to make it their own.

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A hub for teamwork

Second, Microsoft Teams brings together the full breadth and depth of Office 365 to provide a true hub for teamwork. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are all built into Microsoft Teams so people have all the information and tools they need at their fingertips. Backed by the Microsoft Graph, intelligent services are surfaced throughout the workspace to help with information relevancy, discovery and sharing. Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups—our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another, preserve their sense of context and share with others.

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Customizable for each team

Third, since all teams are unique, we’ve invested deeply in ways for people to customize their workspace, with rich extensibility and open APIs available at general availability. For example, Tabs provides quick access to frequently used documents and cloud services. Microsoft Teams also shares the same Connector model as Exchange, providing notifications and updates from third-party services like Twitter or GitHub. Further, we are including full support for the Microsoft Bot Framework to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into your team environment.

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Today, we are also announcing the Microsoft Teams Developer Preview program, allowing developers to extend Microsoft Teams. We will have integrations with over 150 partners at general availability—including our early partners Zendesk, Asana, Hootsuite and Intercom. This is the first step in providing the customization users want and the tools and support our developer community will need to integrate with Microsoft Teams.

Security teams trust

Finally, Microsoft Teams provides the advanced security and compliance capabilities that our Office 365 customers expect. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Like all our commercial services, we have a transparent operational model with no standing access to customer data. Microsoft Teams will support key compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and more. And, as customers would expect, Microsoft Teams is served out of our hyper-scale global network of data centers, automatically provisioned within Office 365 and managed centrally, just as any other Office 365 service.

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Microsoft Teams joins the Office 365 universal toolkit

Microsoft Teams joins the broadest and deepest portfolio of collaboration applications and services to help solve the diverse needs of people and organizations globally. As we’ve learned from our 85 million active monthly users, all groups have a diverse set of needs when it comes to working together. Office 365 is designed for the unique workstyle of every group and includes purpose-built applications, all deeply integrated together.

  • Exchange is the undisputed leader in corporate email and according to Gartner has “80 percent share of companies using cloud email with revenue above $10 billion.”
  • SharePoint provides intranets and content management solutions to more than 200,000 organizations and 190 million people.
  • Yammer is the social network for work, enabling cross-company discussions for 85 percent of the Fortune 500.
  • Skype for Business provides real-time voice, video and conferencing and hosts more than 100 million meetings a month.
  • Office 365 Groups is our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another.

Contact the Atidan team at office365@atidan.com for additional information, free trial of Office 365 and special deployment offers!

 

Blog credit: https://blogs.office.com/2016/11/02/introducing-microsoft-teams-the-chat-based-workspace-in-office-365/

Enriching the Mobile and Intelligent SharePoint Intranet with Team News, Apps for Mobile and more

The intranet is the publishing center of all things happening throughout your company. It is where people keep up with news and discover what’s happening around them at work. It’s time, now, to further empower employees—more precisely, give them a way to broadcast their work.

Today at Ignite, Microsoft is pleased to announce the newest waves of innovations to your mobile and intelligent intranet, powered by SharePoint, including:

  • Team news for SharePoint Online modern team sites (announced today).
  • SharePoint mobile apps for Android and Windows 10 Mobile (in preview today).
  • News roll-up tab within the SharePoint mobile app for iOS (announced today).
  • Create a modern team site and an associated Office 365 group from the SharePoint home (announced today).
  • New people experiences within SharePoint Online team sites, document libraries and lists, and OneDrive for Business (rolling out now).

Below is a summary—along with links to additional resources—of these innovations.

Keep the team informed and up-to-date with team news

Team news is how you keep up with and broadcast key events and accomplishments with other members of the team and extended stakeholders. You can use team news for things like trip reports, best practices, project updates, highlights of new documents and content, welcoming a new team member, sharing team goals and celebrating milestones.

To add a news item, from within the News web part on the team site home page, click + Add to create a news article. Next, add content to the news post using the toolbox—a gallery of web parts—to add text, video, documents, quick links and more. When you’re finished, click Publish and the news article will be featured prominently on the team site home page within the News web part. And when you click See All, you’ll land on a dedicated News page that serves as the team’s news archive.

Below shows how a team site with all the news—front and center—is displayed in the SharePoint mobile app:

Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 1 Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 3
Team news in the SharePoint app. News articles render beautifully in the SharePoint app.

Team news is a great way to broadcast of all the important content from your team. In the future, you will receive mobile and email notifications to help keep you up to date.

SharePoint mobile app previews come to Android and Windows 10 Mobile

In June 2016, Microsoft released the first version of the SharePoint mobile app for iOS—your intranet in your pocket. Today, we are filling more pockets by introducing the SharePoint mobile app for both Android and Windows 10 Mobile previews.

The SharePoint mobile app helps keep your work moving forward by providing quick access to your team sites, organizational portals and the people you work with throughout Office 365 by letting you search for content and people across your organization. We leverage the Microsoft Graph to power several of the in-app experiences, providing you relevant information to get to the content and people you work with most frequently.

Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 4 Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 5
Android: Main Sites tab showing Frequent and Followed sites. Android: Team site showing site activity, files, lists and the full site navigation.
Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 6 Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 7
Windows 10 Mobile: Main Sites tab showing Frequent and Followed sites. Windows 10 Mobile: team site showing site activity, files, lists and the full site navigation.

You can use the SharePoint mobile app to:

  • Navigate from Sites to team sites you follow or frequently visit.
  • Navigate from Links to important sites configured by your organization.
  • Catch up on what’s happened with the Activity view, which shows recent file activity in your team site.
  • Open your document libraries with the OneDrive app and then edit your files using Office mobile apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
  • Learn more about people you work with and discover what they are working on.
  • Perform an enterprise-wide search to find sites, files and people throughout your organization.
  • Android first: you’ll be able to launch a PowerApp from a team site directly in the SharePoint mobile app.

Learn more about SharePoint mobile app for Android and the SharePoint mobile app for Windows 10 Mobile.

Catch up with all your team’s news in the SharePoint app on iOS

If you use the SharePoint app on iOS, you get the first look at the mobile experience of team news. When you tap the News tab, you will see a list of aggregated news using the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph from the sites you work in, the sites you follow and the sites your colleagues work in. SharePoint mobile on iOS gives you one place to catch up on the news from across your intranet. That’s your news in your pocket!

Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 8

News on SharePoint mobile will come to other platforms as a future update.

Create a modern team site and an associated Office 365 group from the SharePoint home

Microsoft is pleased to announce that soon you’ll be able to create a site and a group for your team—right from SharePoint home in Office 365. The Create site wizard will create an Office 365 group as well as a modern SharePoint team site. You will even be able add members and classify the site along the way. And if you’ve ever waited for a SharePoint site to be provisioned in the past, you’ll discover this process will create the site in mere seconds.

Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 9

Coming soon: Create a team site right from SharePoint home.

The result is the same as when you create an Office 365 group from Outlook: every group in Office 365 Groups gets the full power of a SharePoint Online team site.

Know who’s who, and who’s working on what, with new people cards

Teamwork is all about the people and what they’re working on. Now, when you see a person in a SharePoint team site, document library, list, or in OneDrive for Business, the value of discovering more about that person lies at your fingertips where you are already working.

Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet 10

People cards appear in SharePoint document libraries when you hover over a person’s name.

When you hover over a person’s name or photo, you’ll now see a richer people card. Previously, the card contained basic contact information and one-click methods to connect with the person. Now, you instantly see who the person works for and what documents they recently worked on. Powered by the Microsoft Graph, these intelligent people cards provide a personalized and actionable experience as you work with your files across Office 365.

Read more about upcoming updates to people experiences throughout Office 365.

Stay tuned for more innovations

The innovations will keep coming. For example, with news, you’ll see enhancements to the news reading experience on both mobile and web, and you will be able to interact with news as well as sign up for notifications. We’ll expand on team news, using the Microsoft Graph to provide a stream of personalized news from across all your sites, complementing it with traditional corporate news articles. In future iterations, we envision corporate, divisional and influential blog posts to be surfaced along with a blend of top-down, curated content all powered by Microsoft Graph-driven relevance.

Here is a summary of what we’re doing to power your mobile, intelligent intranet:

Release date Feature
First Release in October 2016. Team news in SharePoint Online team sites.
In preview today. SharePoint mobile apps for Android and Windows 10 Mobile.
Update pushed to App Store in October 2016. News tab within SharePoint mobile app for iOS.
First Release in October 2016. Create site from SharePoint home integrated with Office 365 Groups.
Rolling out now. New people experiences in SharePoint Online document libraries and OneDrive for Business.

Every day, the Atidan team is helping our clients to get the most out of SharePoint and Office 365. Please contact us at sharepoint@atidan.com for additional information!

 

Reference: https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/enriching-the-mobile-and-intelligent-intranet-with-team-news-apps-for-android-and-windows-and-more/

 

 

Hyperfish – Complete Your Directory

Atidan is honored to be a launch partner today at Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta. Visit us at Booth #852

What is Hyperfish?

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is a foundation for businesses around the world, but most are missing critical business information. To the organization, the AD is a faceless list of names, and many IT projects fail due to insufficient people and profile information.

Hyperfish enables organizations to automatically identify and populate missing information in Active Directory, quickly and easily.

How does it work?

Hyperfish monitors your Active Directory (AD) or Azure Active Directory (AAD) for information that is missing, incorrect or out of date. Using next generation technology, Hyperfish starts a conversation with each user making it super easy for them to update their information by:

  • Breaking up requests into small, bite size pieces
  • Finding the best way and time to initiate contact
  • Enabling users to respond to requests via email and instant messaging
  • Offering an easy to use mobile-friendly interface
  • Providing suggestions based on information found in Email, LinkedIn and other data sources

What does Hyperfish deliver?

By implementing Hyperfish to complete your directory, you can:

  • Improve the speed and quality of communications across your organization
  • Reduce IT Support costs in maintaining directories
  • Ensure quality and consistent directory information
  • Enable and accelerate key IT projects including Approval Workflows, Personalized Portal, Cloud Migration, Corporate Directory, Mobile Intranet and Organizational Chart
  • Unlock the value in Microsoft Office 365 including Delve, Skype for Business, and SharePoint

Introducing Office 2016 – Takes the Work Out of Working Together

Atidan is pleased to announce the availability of Office 2016! Contact us for a free trial and no obligation briefing and demonstration.

The New Microsoft Office 2016 Video

Office 2016 Product Guide

The new Office—takes the work out of working together

Check out additional resources on our SlideShare site here

The new office is here 1 v2

Collaboration is the way we get things done in the workplace, but the process itself can be complex and frustrating. It shouldn’t have to be. We set out to make working together easier and more impactful by building a suite of integrated apps and services that removes barriers and empowers teams to do and achieve more.

Office has always been the go-to tool for helping individuals do their best work—whether for professional documents, powerful analyses or school presentations. People often start and end their work in Office, but there is often a messy middle that involves a lot of discussion—in person, by phone or via various tools—as well as multiple (sometimes conflicting) inputs. Today we are delivering a set of experiences that is built for making teamwork seamless.

  • We have had real-time co-authoring in all of our web apps since 2013. We are now taking it to the next level by building it directly into our native apps. With this release, we’re making co-authoring in Word real-time, which lets you see what others are writing immediately, as it happens. We’re committed to expanding real-time co-authoring to each of our native apps and you should expect to see more over time.
  • Skype for Business is now available in the client apps, allowing you to IM, screen share, talk or video chat right in your docs. This same experience will be coming to Office Online later this fall. Skype for Business also has faster screen sharing and now adds the option to start a real-time co-authoring session from any conversation or meeting.
  • Keep teams connected with Office 365 Groups, now available as part of Outlook 2016 and in a new Outlook Groups app on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Office 365 Groups allows individuals to easily create public or private teams. Each group includes a shared inbox, calendar, cloud storage for group files, and a shared OneNote notebook to keep the team productive.
  • Office 365 Planner helps teams organize their work, with the ability to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, set due dates and update status. Planner’s visual dashboards and email notifications help keep everyone informed on the overall progress of their initiative. Planner will be available in preview, to Office 365 First Release customers, starting next quarter.
  • Originally unveiled earlier this year, GigJam is today available in private preview and will become part of Office 365 in 2016. GigJam is an unprecedented new way for teams to accomplish tasks and transform business processes by breaking down the barriers between devices, apps and people.

Works for you

Excel 2016 - New Sunburst Chart

In today’s workplace, we have too many apps, devices and tools—we just don’t have enough time. Office is built to cut through the complexity and help you get things done quickly. It gets work done for you.

Some highlights:

  • Outlook 2016 provides the smartest inbox yet, delivering lightning fast search, removing low priority mail automatically and making sure everyone on the To: line has the right access to modern, cloud-based attachments from OneDrive.
  • We also have significant new updates to OneDrive for Business coming later this month across sync, browser, mobile, IT control and developer experiences. The highlight is the preview of the next generation sync client for Windows and Mac, offering improved reliability and selective sync, as well as increased file size and volume limits.
  • Tell Me helps you easily and quickly find the right Office feature or command, and Smart Lookup brings insights from the web right into your documents. Previously available only in Office Online, Tell Me and Smart Lookup are now available across the Office 2016 client apps.
  • Excel 2016 now includes integrated publishing to Power BI and new modern chart-types to help you make the most of your data.
  • The cloud-powered most recently used documents list allows you to pick up right where you left off in seconds, because it travels with you across your devices whether working in Office Online, the mobile apps or in the 2016 client apps.

Perfect with Windows 10

Office Mobile Apps

While we have made a lot of progress on delivering Office cross-platform and remain committed to this strategy, we see Windows as being “home” for Office. Together, Office 365 and Windows 10 are the most complete solution for getting things done.

  • With Windows Hello, you can sign in to your PC and Office 365 with a simple look or a touch—no need to type a password anymore.
  • In the coming months, Cortana will get even smarter and more useful by gathering intelligence on Office 365 through Outlook 2016 support.
  • With the Office Mobile apps and Continuum on Windows phones, your phone can act as a desktop, and you can project, create or edit your presentation or sales budget from your phone to a monitor while using the same phone to take notes with the OneNote app.
  • Sway on Windows 10 was released in early August, and customers love it! It has received a 4.6/5 app store ranking, with customers calling it “funtastic,” “brilliant” and “elegant.” People love Sway’s simple and intuitive yet powerful approach to next-generation digital storytelling. With Sway, you provide the content, and Sway creates beautiful, shareable, interactive stories that look great on any screen.
  • Our Office Mobile apps on Windows 10 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) have also received great reception and 4+ app store rankings. Customers say they are touch-friendly, fast and easy to use—making them wonderful for on-the-go-productivity.

For the enterprise

Office 2016 apps with Office 365 provide the most secure Office yet. We are adding built-in Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to significantly reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data by giving IT admins tools to centrally create, manage and enforce policies for content authoring and document sharing. Multifactor Authentication ensures secure access to content anywhere when employees are away from the corporate network. We are also adding Information Rights Management to Visio. Then, later this year, we will be enabling Enterprise Data Protection (EDP) in Windows 10, with support in Office Mobile, which allows more secure corporate content sharing across corporate managed apps and network/cloud locations, preventing inadvertent content sharing outside corporate boundaries. We will be following up with EDP for Office on Windows desktop in early 2016.

Some of our favorite enterprise apps—Visio and Project—have been updated as well. With Visio 2016, customers can get started quickly with diagramming using starter diagrams and contextual tips. Bringing process models, manufacturing plant or IT architecture to life is now only one step away. With Project 2016, customers can streamline resource engagement processes, manage resource pools through visual heat maps, benefit from multiple timelines, and create custom experiences in Project desktop through write-back capabilities for add-ins.

We are also making deployment easier and have a lot of other new capabilities to help IT professionals, as announced in our blog to IT admins two weeks ago.

Office 2016 for Mac

The new office is here 4 v2

In July, we released Office 2016 for Mac to our Office 365 customers. The new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote are a significant step forward and provide the best of both worlds for Mac users—a familiar Office experience paired with the best of the Mac platform. The level of engagement and excitement about this Office for Mac release has surpassed our expectations. As promised in July, today Office 2016 for Mac will also be available as a one-time purchase.

Ongoing Office 365 customer value

Whew—that was a lot! With this release, we’re also shifting the cadence of Office on Windows to feel much more like the cadence we have on the Office mobile and web apps, which release every month with new value. So, going forward, Office 365 customers will now enjoy new features and capabilities delivered continuously in the Office desktop applications as part of their subscription. It’s a new day for our desktop apps.

And as a bit of a teaser, here are some examples of the types of new features and benefits Office 365 customers will see:

  • Built for teamwork—We’re committed to rich co-authoring and collaboration across our native clients, starting in Word 2016, with other big advances in collaboration coming throughout the year. By the end of 2015, we’ll introduce Office 365 Groups insights and discovery in Office Delve. In addition, we will have a new generation of personal work analytics in Office Delve that will help individuals, teams and organizations to be more effective at work by understanding their reach and impact, time allocation and network.
  • Works for you—For those of you who are excited about our new charts and forecasting, we will be delivering even more new charts, formulas, connectors and other Excel capabilities throughout the year. (If you’re interested in telling us which charts and charting features you’d like to see first, we have a survey going on our Excel Facebook page right now!). We also have some very exciting developments in the pipeline for PowerPoint that will make it easier to design and deliver presentations to wow and engage your audience.
  • Perfect on Windows 10—We are especially excited about how even more valuable your personal assistant Cortana can be when she has insights from Office. This will start to allow Cortana to unlock helpful scenarios, like retrieving your documents, preparing for meetings and more.

Get started

  • Are you ready to purchase? Buy Office 365 to get the new 2016 apps – contact us at office365@atidan.com
  • Are you an existing Office 365 customer who is ready to upgrade? Go here for instructions on how to upgrade to Office 2016 for home, or here for business customers.
  • Do you want to learn more? Go to office.com/2016.

Credit for this blog content is from Microsoft blog https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/thenewoffice/

CardioLog Analytics: Your Leading SharePoint Analytics Solution – Webinar September 30th

CardioLog Analytics: Your Leading SharePoint Analytics Solution

Is your organization looking for a way to take its SharePoint productivity to the next level?

CardioLog Analytics, Atidan and our webinar on Tuesday, September 30, 2014 at 1 PM EST will offer various insights, tools and demonstrate how our SharePoint analytics solution can ultimately help you increase goal achievement, portal optimization and much more.

​Is your organization looking for a way to take its SharePoint productivity to the next level?

CardioLog Analytics, Atidan and our webinar on Tuesday, September 30, 2014 at 1 PM EST will offer various insights, tools and demonstrate how our SharePoint analytics solution can ultimately help you increase goal achievement, portal optimization and much more.  Register Here!

SharePoint users worldwide are looking for a means to ensure their portals and the ever-advancing technology of their intranets, whether implemented on premise or on the cloud, are at their optimal levels of productivity in order to achieve business goals. CardioLog Analytics is the leading solution for all SharePoint portals, on premise and on demand, offering the highest quality and most advanced metrics on visitor activity, navigation, search, content and portal growth, and overall SharePoint usage and activity.

With the growing demand for the integration of Enterprise Social Networks into SharePoint portals, CardioLog Analytics offers reports on Yammer and Sitrion activity, along with various other third party integrated solutions such as Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and more.

Learn more about how you can use these statistics and the data provided with the reports CardioLog Analytics offers to benefit your company’s portal adoption rates and overall efficiency.

New “Groups” Launching in Office 365 for Improved Enterprise Collaboration

This past week, I was presenting the ‘Modern Office’ and the collection of Office 365 applications from Microsoft to a CIO and his senior team commented on the challenge of introducing so many applications, especially Yammer, Lync, and SharePoint on top of email, OneDrive, and new Office 2013. Too many disconnected tools!

It is great news that the new ‘Groups’ solution is launching to all Office 365 users starting today for early release subscribers and will continue with general availability by the end of 2014. It is a place for ad hoc teams to collaborate through email, calendars, files and conversations in one place. For everyone who has hesitated to roll out Yammer, this is a great way to get started on enterprise social collaboration.

Public and private groups are possible and you may include participants outside of your organization. Conversations come back to your inbox so everything can be done in Outlook or through the Group site on Office 365 Web Access.  A Group calendar can be created and synced automatically to your personal calendar. All files are stored in the OneDrive for Business workplace. Search is again a powerful productivity tool for group members to find information fast.

Unfortunately, this initial release is via the Outlook or Office 365 WEB APP only. Exciting news is that Lync and Yammer will be added to the equation soon, and many more features are coming in 2015.

  • Note for IT Teams: you can impose access request controls for external sharing and you can manage Group membership in the Office 365 Admin center
  • Some sample screen shots enclosed below where we started a small conversation about event we are holding on Tuesday- sharing links, photos, presentations, etc. with automatic emails to the team.
  • Enclosing links to additional support and instructions about Groups that you can post on your SharePoint Intranet
  • Great comparison chart describing the differences between Groups, Distribution Lists, Site Mailboxes, Shared Mailbox and Public Folders
  • As always, please let us know if we can assist you with Office 365 administration, training or support!

Office 365 Groups Page 1 Office 365 Groups Page 3 Office 365 Groups Page 2

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Find help about groups in Office 365

A group is a shared workspace for email, conversations, files, and calendar events where group members can conveniently collaborate and quickly get stuff done. To learn how to use and manage groups to be even more productive, check out the topics below.

Getting started

Using groups day-to-day

Managing groups

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Collaboration in Office 365

Office 365 encourages collaboration through Groups, distribution lists (also called distribution groups), site mailboxes, shared mailboxes, and public folders. Each of these options has a different purpose, user experience, and feature set. What to use depends on what the user needs to do and which tools your organization provides.

Summary of collaboration options

This table explains the various collaboration options available to you with Office 365.

Collaboration tool Description
Group A shared workspace that works across all applications in Office 365. Includes a shared inbox, calendar, and OneDrive for Business site for storing files. Users can create, find, and join Groups right from their email or calendar. Users need both a OneDrive for Business license and an Exchange Online license to participate in Groups.
Distribution list (also called distribution group) Used to distribute email messages to two or more people at the same time. Distribution groups are also known as mail-enabled distribution groups. A variant of the distribution group, called the dynamic distribution group, is a mail-enabled Active Directory group object used to send email to a large and evolving group of recipients. The exact recipients are determined by filters and conditions that you specify, such as all members of a particular locale or all full-time employees.
Site mailbox Includes SharePoint Online site membership (owners and members), shared storage through an Exchange mailbox for email messages, and a SharePoint Online site to store and share documents. A site mailbox brings Exchange email and SharePoint documents together. A site mailbox serves as a central filing cabinet for the project, providing a place to file project email and documents that can be accessed and edited only by site members. In addition, site mailboxes have a specified lifecycle and are optimized to be used for projects that have set start and end dates.
Shared mailbox A mailbox for select users to read and send email messages and share a common calendar. Shared mailboxes also can serve as a generic email address (such as info@contoso.com or sales@contoso.com) that customers can use to inquire about your company. When the Send As permission is enabled on the shared mailbox, email sent from the mailbox will use the generic address (e.g., sales@contoso.com).
Public folder Designed for shared access, pubic folders provide an easy and effective way to collect, organize, and share information with other people in your organization. Public folders organize content in a deep hierarchy that’s easy to browse and always visible in the Outlook folder view. A public folder can be mail-enabled and added as a member of the distribution group. Email sent to the distribution group is automatically added to the public folder for archiving or later reference. Public folders also provide simple document sharing when you don’t have a SharePoint Online subscription.

Which collaboration tool to use?

The following table gives you a quick glance at the various types of groups and explains when and how to use them with the various collaboration features of Office 365.

Groups Distribution lists Site mailboxes Shared mailboxes Public folders
Who uses? Users who want a collaboration workspace for their group messages, files, and calendar that is integrated with the Office 365 services they already use (Outlook Web App, OneDrive for Business) Users who need to send email to a group of recipients with a common interest or characteristic. Users who work together on a specific project with definitive start and end dates. Project documents are stored on a SharePoint Online site and team members send and receive project-related email via the site mailbox. Delegates working on behalf of a virtual identity, such as support@contoso.com. Delgates can respond to email as that shared mailbox identity. With the proper permissions, everyone in your organization can access and search public folders. They are ideal for email archiving or for sharing documents.
Ideal group size Any Large Small Small Large
Access Exchange Online and Office 365 users For distribution groups, members, must be manually added. For dynamic distribution groups, members are added based on filtering criteria. Site mailbox owners and members Users can be granted Full Access and/or Send As permissions. If granted Full Access permissions, users must also add the shared mailbox to their Outlook profile to access the shared mailbox. Accessible by anyone in your organization
Shared calendar? Yes No No Yes Yes
Email arrives in user’s personal Inbox? No. Users can subscribe to a group and then forward all Group messages to their inbox Yes. Email arrives in the inbox of all distribution group members. No. Email arrives in the site mailbox. No. Email arrives in the Inbox of the shared mailbox. No. Email arrives in the public folder.
Supported clients
  • Outlook 2013 (forward after subscribing)
  • Outlook Web App
  • Outlook 2010 (forward after subscribing)
  • Outlook 2007 (forward after subscribing)
  • Outlook 2013
  • Outlook Web App
  • Outlook 2010
  • Outlook 2007
  • Outlook 2013
  • SharePoint Online
  • Outlook 2013
  • Outlook Web App
  • Outlook 2010
  • Outlook 2007
  • Outlook 2013
  • Outlook Web App
  • Outlook 2010
  • Outlook 2007

Turn Yammer On and Collaborate Confidently – Webinar Wednesday February 19, 2014 at 1:30PM Eastern – Archiving and compliance with Smarsh and Atidan

Join Atidan and Smarsh on Februrary 19th at 1:30PM Eastern where we will demonstrate archiving and compliance for Microsoft’s Yammer social networking platform.  Register here: http://goo.gl/Ojstvh

Many organizations would like to take advantage of the increased cross-department collaboration and employee engagement that Yammer brings, but risk management considerations have loomed as too large of an adoption barrier.Image

Smarsh Archiving & Compliance for Yammer enables organizations to capture, preserve, search, supervise and produce Yammer files and communications in support of e-discovery, compliance and record keeping initiatives. Now organizations can have compliance peace of mind while their employees use Yammer to collaborate, be more productive and update the people, projects and files that they’re working with every day.

Within the Web-based Smarsh Management Console, administrators can search, supervise and produce their organization’s Yammer content alongside other message types, including email, instant messaging and social media. Organizations can also extend the power of the Smarsh proprietary classification and review engine, the Virtual Compliance Officer, to their Yammer archive. Whether it’s streamlining and customizing review processes, focusing search results on the messages that matter most, or automating the classification of communication with custom tags, the VCO offers unmatched efficiency in message review.

At the conclusion of our demonstration, we will describe how Smarsh’s platform can archive and search all electronic message types, including email, instant messaging and social media, in one consolidated destination.

All registrations will be entered to win free copies of Windows 8 and Office 2013!

Contact us at smarsh@atidan.com for additional information about our archiving and compliance solutions!

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Capture 

Yammer communications, including updates, comments, files, and private messages are captured.

  • Comprehensive capture | Smarsh also captures associated metadata, providing greater context around message activity.
  • Support for attachments and versioning | Smarsh archives Yammer attachments and files, including all versions.

Preserve 

Yammer communication is preserved on non-erasable, non-rewriteable media in its native, unaltered format to meet recordkeeping and compliance obligations.

  • Global access | Messages and attachments are always readily accessible via the Web-based Smarsh Management Console.
  • Redundant data centers | Messages are preserved in the redundant, geographically-dispersed Smarsh data centers and saved to WORM (write once, read many) optical storage.
  • Retention policies | Messages are retained in accordance with client retention policies (and active legal holds).

Search

Administrators can search across their Yammer archive based on virtually any criteria, either ad-hoc or on a consistent, systematic basis.

  • Robust field search | Search across all Yammer communications and review entire threads of messages for the context of posts, comments and files.
  • Saved searches | Save search criteria and repeat searches for convenience, consistency and evidence of policy enforcement.
  • E-discovery searches | Run robust ad-hoc discovery searches for one-time instances.
  • Support for multiple lexicon lists | Clients can customize company-approved lexicons of keywords/phrases for search and/or start with a default list provided by Smarsh.

Supervise 

Customize your organization’s supervision experience for optimal efficiency in message review and effectiveness in identifying and mitigating risk. 

  • Hierarchy structure | Permission-based review hierarchy can be configured to model the review structure of your organization. Administrators can assign message supervision roles/authorities to specific users and groups, and grant the appropriate level of access/functionality to them. Smarsh can grant temporary permissions or access to compliance consultants, outside legal counsel or other individuals.
  • Run saved searches | Execute review procedures with regularly scheduled saved searches.
  • Flexible search options |Match search type (random percent, risk score, keywords or phrases) to risk profile.
  • Contextual review | Track the entire thread of each message with comments from multiple individuals, giving a conversation context during review.
  • Full audit review | Every administrator session and action taken throughout the entire lifecycle of a message is documented within the Smarsh Management Console.
  • Take action on messages | Reviewers have the ability to annotate, flag, open/close or escalate messages. All actions are logged and the subsequent metadata is indexed and searchable.
  • Reporting Center | Produce analytics reports on Yammer usage, system audit history and message archive data. Demonstrate policy enforcement and ensure accountability among multiple managers responsible for message review. Reports can be customized.

Produce 

Administrators can retrieve and produce as many messages as necessary, in original form, on demand. Apply policies and export only the necessary data in multiple formats securely and directly to outside counsel, regulatory examiners or third-party e-discovery systems during litigation or e-discovery events.

  • Production options | Yammer data can be securely downloaded to a PC or encrypted and saved to a portable media device. This can be utilized for real-time access to data during an investigation or examination, or to restore data for disaster recovery purposes.
  • Flexible e-discovery export | Export message data in popular e-discovery vendor “load file” formats (and the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) XML Interchange Format Schema) and transfer it directly to document review and processing systems.
  • Monthly DVD service | As part of its service package, Smarsh delivers monthly copies of client data via encrypted DVD.

We Archive Everything

Archive and search all electronic message types, including email, instant messaging and social media, in one consolidated destination.

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.

Transformational Trends

Azure Transformational Trends

Mobility and Cloud:

In the future, computing will be everywhere and vastly more integrated. Not only will our devices talk to one another, the range of “devices” will expand to include cars, buildings, roads, cities and homes, and our interactions with technology will be more natural and intuitive.

Our focus is on integrating our services with advanced hardware in a way that unifies all the devices people use daily. Our devices are not only connected to unique communications, productivity and entertainment services from Microsoft, but can also access great services and applications from our partners and developers.

We believe we, along with our partners such as Atidan, are uniquely positioned to bring together the best in devices and services, resulting in amazing experiences for our customers – whether SMBs or enterprises.

Microsoft has the expertise, breadth of knowledge and ecosystem capabilities to lead the shift to cloud computing.

Our partner-centric approach has been with us since the very beginning; it’s what helped define our success in the personal computing era, and it’s what differentiates us in today’s devices and services era.

Social:

Social technology may be relatively new from a business perspective, but it’s already a normal part of day-to-day life for tens of millions of people. Those people are employees, partners and customers. The way we connect and interact with people, information and organizations is changing, and these changes are having a profound impact on the modern workplace.

Enterprise social is the new cornerstone of workplace collaboration and addresses the changing nature of work. For enterprise social tools to be effective, it can’t just be a destination; social has to be woven into the apps people use every day to unite the people, information and application data in a way that drives greater effectiveness, performance and agility.

Microsoft provides a compelling vision, complete enterprise social solutions, and the proven expertise to help companies get social right.

Big Data:

Big data has the potential to change the way organizations, academic institutions and even consumers conduct business, make discoveries and interact in their day-to-day lives. Microsoft believes big data has the power to drive practical and theoretical insights that have eluded people to date.

We’re not there yet. The data is big, but the tools for analyzing big data have not fully permeated down to people who are most capable of seeing new possibilities. It’s not enough to be able to harness unstructured data and fuse it with structured data.

Some organizations are already winning with better, faster insight. According to Gartner, “By 2015, organizations that build a modern information management system will outperform their peers financially by 20 percent.” Big data insights are opening new doors to businesses of all types.

We know other organizations will follow, and when they do, we’ll see a period of incredible innovation and disruption. Yet, this is not a technology story; it’s a people story. Microsoft wants to empower the broadest set of people to explore big data, and we’re going big to deliver on this goal. We’ve always believed that making technology available to more people would unleash insights on a scale never seen before. So today we’re planting a stake in the ground on big data, sharing our point of view on turning big data’s potential into reality.

As tools and skills proliferate, big data insight will shift to the masses. The outcome will be smarter cities, greater academic learning and discovery, better and more health/wellness initiatives, more efficient use of natural resources, safer energy acquisition, better customer service at retail, more accurate risk assessment within finance, and infinitely others.

Sources: IDC and Gartner

Presented by David Rosenthal, CEO Atidan, Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) October 28, 2013