The Microsoft Ignite 2017 conference has just ended last week. It was full of very interesting keynotes, presentations, workshops and demos. I haven’t had the opportunity to be there myself, however I was trying to follow up Twitter and all content being published during the event. This is my summary of the most interesting announcements, specifically for the SharePoint and Office 365.
Have you ever faced that issue? When your workflow is running smoothly and out of nowhere it gets suspended? Then when you hover the “i” icon to get more details you are informed, that “The workflow instance was too large to persist”? Well I had. Here is what I found and how I recommend to solve it.
Although story of SharePoint Designer 2013 is slowly reaching its end and it is known for sure that shortly after 2020 will be deprecated, still there are many clients using it and developing their solutions with its help.
The post continues the previous one, where I was trying to compare Groups with Teams. Despite the comparison was possible, Office 365 Group is not, what I underlined then, a standalone application, but a security object. Remember also, that Office 365 Groups were first introduced somewhere in 2014. Over the years it was being extended to work with other Office 365 based applications as well to be used in hybrid scenarios with on-premise Exchange.
Since it’s very beginning the narration that Microsoft was building around the concept was, that it is a tool dedicated for groups of employees, that delivers tools assisting and helping in their ongoing work, collaboration and communication.
Office 365 Groups are a quite old concept. They were first introduced somewhere in 2014, but since then the concept developed, from a simple Shared Mailbox, into a tool dedicated for collaboration between employees. Then, in November 2016 Microsoft Teams went public what… brought a lot of confusion on users’ faces. I guess this confusion is still present.
I this post I am not trying to explain when to use what, but to compare those two products to show you their capabilities and… to help you answer on your own, which tool to use when.
Yesterday I was crawling Twitter being a bit upset, that I cannot find any mark of the new Communication Sites. It was said, that my tenant must be set to be in “First release” to get that new feature before anyone else in the world. So I did it. But still, no sign.
Then I read somewhere, that it cannot be the “First release for everyone”, but “First release for selected users”! Go to https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/companyprofile and change “Release preferences” indicating your account as one from the selected users.
Earlier this month (20th of June) Microsoft Stream, the new application in the Office 365 family, became Generally Available. Many users are still in doubt because that is not very clear how this app is positioned to the Office 365 Video actually. The answer however is quite simple – many organizations demand having a secure and trusty storage to keep and stream multimedia files – which are in fact the largest files organizations are working with.
Microsoft Forms is a simple tool, that allows to create pools and quizzes and of course – collect responses. First it was created for educational purposes. Microsoft claims it was a result of the request from the tutors and students, as they needed a tool to easy create questionnaires and track responses.
The topic is repeatedly discussed over the years. It doesn’t really rely on any specific IT system. Even more – the user adoption is a common word describing how fast and how likely users are getting familiar with and accept a new product, innovation, etc… Not in IT exclusively. It really applies to every segment of the market, where a product or service is being sold to the end-user. The faster user “buys” it, the faster ROI rises.
During the Collaboration Summit that has recently took place in Zagreb, I’ve attended Jussi Mori’s seminar where he was talking about that topic, trying to evaluate reasons for which users do not want to easily adopt new things and ways to help them working it out. This presentation inspired me to make a little more research on the topic, what resulted in writing this post.
Nevertheless, the post is going to be about the user adoption in IT especially, moreover – it will apply to the Microsoft products. To be even more precise – to SharePoint and the whole Office 365.
This year’s Collaboration Summit in Zagreb has just ended, but comments related to the event are still showing on Twitter (look yourself here). I was present at the event for the first time and even though, that many of the news that were presented had already been announced during the SP Virtual Summit (here), I found it very worth to be there. Presenters were making many “deep dives” into the new features being ahead of us in Office 365. Especially Dan Holme showed a live demo of how the new Communication Sites and refreshed Team Sites are going to look like and how the content authoring is going to change.