There is no question that organizations have become much more familiar with the digital productivity tools available to them in the past couple of years with the tremendous shift to the hybrid workforce. As a result, cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments have become wildly popular. Microsoft 365, particularly Microsoft Teams, has been incredibly popular with businesses to bolster and support productivity.

Many may view Microsoft Teams as only a chat and collaboration platform for fellow teammates in the business. However, a large part of the robust capabilities that Microsoft Teams brings to the table is the rich set of integrations from Teams into other solutions and what capabilities these integrations offer.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a behemoth of a product that allows users to collaborate with teammates, communicate, share files, work on projects, and many other capabilities. True to the name of the service, it allows end-users who may be located in different geographic regions worldwide to communicate and function as a team effectively.

One of the tremendous selling points of Microsoft Teams is the ability to consolidate and have all the tools that users need in a single location. Historically, many businesses may have a chat application, a video conferencing solution, a document sharing platform, a file repository, and other individual services that make up their portfolio of productivity tools.

Microsoft Teams allows organizations to consolidate these productivity tools and services into the Teams platform as it provides all of the capabilities mentioned above natively. In addition, it drastically streamlines productivity workflows as users do not have to leave the Teams app to do what they need to do. Take note of the Microsoft Teams services:

• • Chat

• • Voice calls

• • Video conferencing

• • File sharing

• • Shared calendars

• • Internal Wikis

• • Others

The all-inclusive nature of Teams also simplifies the provisioning of corporate devices as IT teams now only need to ensure employees have access to Teams instead of dozens of other applications taking care of individual services. In addition, all of the services provided under the umbrella of Microsoft Teams are accessible using a single login.

The platform has resonated with businesses worldwide and has led to tremendous growth across the board. In July 2021, Microsoft teams hit the 250 million monthly active user milestone.

Microsoft Teams has over 250 million monthly active users

However, even if users are taking advantage of native Microsoft Teams functionality, they may be missing out on one of the more powerful features of teams. What is this? Microsoft Teams integrations.

Microsoft Teams App Integrations to Boost Your Team Productivity

The Microsoft Teams architecture allows the integration of various tools, applications, services, and other third-party solutions into the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. The Teams integrations are arguably one of the platform’s hidden gems and enable organizations to integrate different productivity workflows into their Teams environment seamlessly.

Due to the explosive popularity of Microsoft Teams, third-party app developers are generally developing “Teams-integrated” versions of their apps to provide the “hook” into the Teams solution for their specific app functionality. Today, over 1200+ integrations with Microsoft Teams are listed in the AppSource site for Teams apps.

Exploring Microsoft Teams app integrations in the Microsoft AppSource site

First off, what is meant by Microsoft Teams integrations? When applications are written to be “integrated” with other apps, the developers have added modules that allow the applications to “connect” to other applications. These connections or “integrations” make them appear and function seamlessly like they were designed to work together, even if they weren’t originally.

Application integrations allow the application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate from one backend application to another in a way that enables the applications to connect, exchange data, communicate, and by extension, allow users to use applications together seamlessly.

As you can tell, the discussion leads to the fact that Microsoft Teams is a platform to which other applications can integrate. These integrations exponentially expand the capabilities and functionality of what each application can do individually. Microsoft Teams often becomes the “hub” of communication, collaboration, file sharing, calendaring, and other capabilities. So it becomes a great application that can centralize and connect other disaggregate cloud services and solutions an organization may use.

Microsoft Teams integrations are handled by “apps” available within Microsoft Teams. Teams can easily be extended with additional functionality with the various apps available for Teams, like cloud SaaS marketplace applications that extend functionality.

Let’s discuss a few creative ways to integrate Teams into your organization by exploring application integrations with Teams that can significantly benefit your organization. We’re going to look at the following integrations with Microsoft Teams:

• • Power BI

• • Github

• • Adobe Creative Cloud

• • Jira

• • Zoom

• • Trello

• • Geekbot

• • Polly

• • Karma

• • ServiceNow

Power BI

With Power BI, Microsoft dispels the thought that organizations can make critical business decisions without the data to support those decisions. Instead, power BI is all about raw data and presenting the data in a way that enables data modelling, visualization, and reporting with customized key performance indicators (KPIs) tailored for your business use cases. These capabilities enable businesses to make data-informed decisions. In addition, power BI leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to answer business questions quickly.

As business teams collaborate using Microsoft Teams, integrating Power BI into the Teams platform enables individual teams collaborating on data-driven projects to share and collaborate on interactive Power BI content in Microsoft Teams channels and chats. This integration enables the following:

• • Allows colleagues to find and discuss Team’s data

• • Embed interactive reports directly into Teams channels and chats

• • Paste links to your reports, dashboards, and apps

• • Share a filtered view of your Power BI reports and dashboards

• • Get notified in the Teams activity feed when important things happen in Power BI

• • Integrate a Power BI report in Teams and share it with external users

Power BI integration with Microsoft Teams

Having rich data-driven models, graphs, charts, and other information at the fingertips of Teams users provides a powerful tool to enrich the collaboration of the hybrid workforce.

Github

There is arguably no more popular and impactful service to the application development world than Github. Github and similar services are at the heart of modern application development, featuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

In 2020, Github announced a new integration with Microsoft Teams that allows developers to collaborate around their projects from the context of Microsoft Teams. So what does the new Github integration with Microsoft Teams bring to the table? Developers and DevOps teams can now see the following in Microsoft Teams from their Github environment:

• • New commits

• • New pull requests

• • New issues

• • Status updates

• • Comments

• • Code reviews

Using the syntax @github subscribe [repository name], users can start receiving the pertinent updates from Github in their Teams channels. In addition, organizations can transform user discussions in Teams chat into Github actions, including pull requests, issue notifications, and other Github actions.

Native Github integration with Microsoft Teams provides easy access to code repositories and actions

Using Microsoft Teams and Github integration, developers can schedule reminders for pull requests as part of a channel or personal chat. Also, developers can share links directly from Github and post these into Teams channels for easy viewing, including links such as:

• • Pull requests

• • Issues

• • Comments

• • Code snippets

• • Repositories

• • Accounts or organizations

These native Github features and actions performed directly from Microsoft Teams enable businesses to empower developers and users to monitor, plan and collaborate on Github code without leaving the context of Microsoft Teams and logging into Github and other interfaces directly.

The efficient communication and collaboration between code teams enabled by Teams and Github integration help facilitate modern development methodologies such as Agile development.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Many organizations have a creative department working on the creative design aspects of the business. Together with Microsoft Teams, Adobe Creative Cloud allows organizations to extend creative design workflows for the hybrid workforce using Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Teams’ communication and collaboration strengths.

The integration between the two platforms enables users to have new levels of visibility and oversight to their Create Cloud projects and in a centralized virtual workspace for collaboration. In addition, having access to your Creative Cloud files and assets from within Microsoft Teams enables finding what you need much more quickly.

Instead of chatting about an Adobe Creative file or asset with a teammate and detailing where they can find these resources, integration with Microsoft Teams allows placing these resources directly into your Teams chat conversations and within channel posts.

Adobe Creative Cloud brings together creation and collaboration in a single platform

Enterprise customers can also enjoy the benefits of Single Sign-On (SSO) with Azure Active Directory. However, the Microsoft Teams Adobe Creative Cloud app is available even to those on the free plan versions. You simply need a valid Adobe login.

Features of the Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Teams integration include:

• • Pin Adobe Creative Cloud assets directly to a channel tab and get feedback from teammates or other business stakeholders quickly and easily

• • Creative Cloud assets can be shared in Microsoft Teams chat messages in rich formats

• • Ability to use the Adobe Creative Cloud bot to keep track of activity on Creative Cloud assets using the Teams notifications feature

• • Have visibility to version updates or comments made on Creative Cloud files

• • Get notified of comments and updates to Creative Cloud files in Teams

Jira

Atlassian Jira is one of the top issue tracking and project management solutions enterprise organizations use today. Many organizations are running Jira for bug tracking and agile project management. To go along with the common theme of efficiency with Microsoft Teams integration, Jira integration with Microsoft Teams provides a powerful integration for organizations to empower team members. Teams can use the centralized platform of Microsoft Teams to interact with and use Jira, all from within Teams.

With the Jira integration for Microsoft Teams, it includes the following features:

• • Quick actions with Jira Server bots

• • Search, share, or create new Jira issues for team members

• • Track team progress and tasks with tabs

• • Search, share and create new or existing issues

• • Track issues assigned to you or reported by you in the personal app

Jira integration with Microsoft Teams

Zoom

There is no question Zoom is the absolute king of the hill when it comes to video conferencing. Since the pandemic began, Zoom, like Microsoft Teams, has seen explosive growth across the board. As a result, Zoom has become synonymous with video conference meetings.

While Microsoft Teams has video calling functionality built-in, it still makes sense to integrate Zoom with Microsoft Teams. Why? Integrating Zoom meetings with your Microsoft Teams environment allows using Zoom seamlessly from your Microsoft Teams environment. Additionally, it is beneficial when joining video calls with other organizations, affiliates, third parties, and others using Zoom rather than Teams.

Also, many companies prefer the video conferencing functionality of Zoom over Microsoft Teams, or they may have been a Zoom customer before rolling out Microsoft Teams. The Zoom integration with Microsoft Teams provides many additional benefits for Zoom customers who want to use its functionality inside Teams.

With the Zoom Teams integration, customers can:

• • Launch Zoom meetings without leaving Microsoft Teams

• • Create a new Zoom meeting

• • Get Zoom meeting information and summaries

• • View and access Zoom meeting recordings

Zoom integration with Microsoft Teams with Teams apps integration

Trello

Trello is an app that allows businesses to manage projects and achieve their productivity goals. It features intelligent boards, lists, and cards that organize tasks and foster a cohesive team. Trello for Microsoft Teams allows businesses to work creatively to collaborate, achieve goals, and manage projects using the Trello framework for doing so.

Within Microsoft Teams, you can view your Trello boards, lists, and cards. You can also create new cards, move existing cards between lists in Trello, set due dates, and mark cards as complete. In addition, the Trello board can be added as a tab in the Teams channel. It allows everyone to view the board and navigate between the tasks it contains.

Trello for Microsoft Teams allows businesses to manage their projects within Teams

Within Microsoft Teams, you can use the Messaging Extension for Trello to search specific Trello cards utilizing a keyword. Additionally, users can send Trello cards to Microsoft Teams conversations.

Geekbot

Many organizations today are taking advantage of the agile development methodology. The Scrum framework is a prevalent model used with the agile development methodology. However, while software development teams commonly use it, it can also be used across many verticals and applied to increase productivity across the board.

Scrum standups are a central part of the agile development methodology that is much like a “sports huddle” where the team stays informed, connected, and helps to give light to progress made on current tasks.

Geekbot is a solution that provides a way to automate standups, retrospectives, and surveys from within the company’s Microsoft Teams environment. Geekbot helps to empower the already communication-rich Teams platform with the automated interactions provided by Geekbot.

Geekbot allows sending questions, getting responses, and sharing these within a Microsoft Teams channel, automatically, without any manual activities. Organizations are using this very creative Microsoft Teams integration to run asynchronous standups that help bring remote-first employees together, get to know one another and make the best use of everyone’s time.

While in-person standups may be needed from time to time, Geekbot helps keep productivity flowing without interrupting the workflow between team members daily.

Geekbot helps to empower the already communication-rich Teams platform with the automated interactions provided by Geekbot.

When many businesses use remote workers who live in different time zones, finding a way to come together for standups synchronously can be challenging. Using the Geekbot integration with Microsoft Teams helps organizations make the most of the digital communication and collaboration platform and use Geekbot to have more productive, concise, and effective standup meetings.

Polly

Microsoft Teams provides a great platform for users to communicate and collaborate. However, when team leads or managers need to gather feedback, they want to do this in the least disruptive way possible and with as few meetings as possible to keep from interrupting the team’s productivity.

Polly is a solution that allows gathering feedback from team members within Microsoft Teams. It enables creating polls that can be scheduled, configurable options, question types, anonymity levels, and controlling how results are displayed in Teams.

It helps remove the barriers to constructive feedback since Polly can be configured with anonymity to users and allows gathering needed feedback to move projects and tasks forward.

Polly makes gathering feedback and input from team members extremely easy

Karmabot

It can be challenging to keep track of employee performance, especially when workers are located across time zones and remote locations. Karmabot helps organizations track the strengths and weaknesses of teams to help with productivity. In addition, Karmabot allows teammates and supervisors to award one another for achievements. The points can be added up and used for tangible rewards at specified intervals such as cash, parties, or other rewards that appeal to team members.

Karmabot uses machine learning algorithms and natural language understanding to glean important information about users and how each team functions. As a result, it helps to enhance Microsoft Teams with the tools needed to strengthen the performance of the team and award performance achievements.

In the age of remote work, Karmabot helps bring teams together, even if these are remote. It also helps encourage teammates to increase the quality of their work and unlock the group’s potential as a whole. Traditionally, it has been more challenging to gauge the accomplishments of remote workers and how well they contribute to the team. Karmabot helps to change that with the technology tools needed to recognize the well-deserved achievements across the hybrid workforce.

Karmabot helps to reward team members and promote productivity

ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a SaaS-based IT service management (ITSM) platform that provides a fully-featured solution for organizations to manage their service desk operations. However, ServiceNow is more than a simple ticketing system. Instead, it is a task management system that can fully manage tasks and workflows in IT and also across the entire organization.

Many organizations are using ServiceNow across the enterprise. In addition, many Microsoft Teams customers are also ServiceNow customers. With Microsoft Teams being the centralized communication and collaboration platform, it would be beneficial to have visibility of the ServiceNow environment within Microsoft Teams.

With the Now Virtual Agent, organizations can integrate ServiceNow with Microsoft Teams and perform ServiceNow tasks directly in Teams to allow many efficiency benefits.

It includes many features, including:

• • Performing routine ServiceNow actions via Microsoft Teams chat

• • Interoperate with existing ServiceNow apps

• • Find answers to questions using your ServiceNow database

• • Resolve ServiceNow IT requests and other tasks from within Teams

The ServiceNow Virtual Agent for Microsoft Teams

Ways to build collaborative teams

Over the past two years, the hybrid remote workforce has been highly beneficial to organizations with work-from-home mandates, travel restrictions, and other challenges related to the global pandemic. As a result, businesses have had to reimagine collaboration and communication.

Tools like Microsoft Teams and the powerful integrations discussed, among others, have allowed organizations to carry on, despite the challenges. Building collaborative teams in challenging circumstances and with highly virtual layouts requires the following:

• • Effective communication

• • Tools to empower users

• • Easy access to resources

• • Free flow of ideas

• • The feeling of being part of a team

• • Motivation

Generally speaking, a successful and productive business usually has the right mix of people, processes, and technology. No amount of technology can replace talented individual team members. However, to keep that talent motivated and directed to a central purpose of productivity, having the right processes and technology solutions allows businesses to accomplish this goal.

Organizations can empower collaborative teams using the core collaboration and communication features built into the platform using Microsoft Teams. As stated earlier, Teams provide the tools that allow teammates to come together, communicate, collaborate, and feel the team’s bond no matter where they are located.

Building on the underlying capabilities of Microsoft Teams, organizations can add robust integrations on top of the central functionality. For example, empowering team members with easy access to Power BI data from within Teams enables making intelligent decisions based on real numbers.

Developers, business analysts, and creative personnel, among others, benefit from the integration with Github, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Jira. Communication capabilities can even be further bolstered with the Zoom integration with Teams, and the project management capabilities brought to the platform by Trello. ServiceNow integration with Microsoft Teams provides the task management capabilities to users right from the Teams interface.

Then, the “human-aspect” integrations with Microsoft Teams don’t provide access to a specific resource but rather help make virtual teams work cohesively and efficiently. In addition, they keep a pulse of user feedback, end-user morale, motivation, and recognition of jobs well done. These include the benefits of integrations such as Geekbot, Polly, and Karmabot.

By using these valuable integrations and many others in the Microsoft Teams app store, organizations can build collaborative, motivated, and satisfied teams, something that hasn’t been easy with the hybrid workforce.

Integration with remote and hybrid teams

Again, taking advantage of the people, processes, and technology to empower today’s hybrid workforce, teams may collaborate effectively, in person and remotely. The communication and collaboration tools found in Microsoft Teams make any disparity between in-person work and remote or hybrid teams seamless.

No matter where users or teammates are located, the Microsoft Teams platform, with its many integrations, allows organizations to empower users with the right tools and communication tools. In addition, since it is cloud-based, Microsoft Teams ensures that all employees have access to the same great tools, whether on-premises or working remotely, eliminating any disparity there.

Microsoft Teams helps overcome the challenges of impeded collaboration and communication based on connectivity back to the corporate datacenter. In traditional scenarios, on-premises employees often have “better” access to the business-critical resources needed for collaboration, productivity, and communication than remote employees.

Microsoft Teams and third-party app integrations remove these traditional barriers to productivity for remote employees and ensure everyone has equal access to the same toolset and resources.

Microsoft Teams platform – central to automated processes and tasks

An increasingly common and creative use of Microsoft Teams and other platforms is using the platform to drive automation. More commonly now, event-driven automation allows businesses to notify communication platforms like Microsoft Teams. While email notifications and other legacy platforms to receive automated messaging are still very common, many automation teams are seeing the value in targeting collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams for essential notifications.

Using the rich integrations with other third-party integration, organizations can drive feature-rich automation that can look for specific events posted in Teams channels, as an example, and do something with those notifications. For example, looking for particular keywords or tags found in Microsoft Teams channels, automated actions can be generated, such as creating a ticket in Jira or ServiceNow.

This type of use case for Microsoft Teams helps organizations have a more proactive and DevOps approach to triaging and remediating issues in the environment. It can also prove helpful to have a tiered approach. For example, maybe these are only notified via email with specific events. However, for more critical events and alerts in the environment, posting out to specific Teams channels provides an escalation path for critical events in the infrastructure or data environment.

So Which Integrations are Essential?

Organizations today are using technology tools in creative ways to empower the remote and hybrid workforce to communicate and collaborate. Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular and powerful cloud-based platforms used by businesses today. It provides a rich set of native features and functionality in the platform. Also, it provides a long list of third-party app integrations that help extend the native features and capabilities.

Due to its popularity in the enterprise, many software companies write app integrations to allow seamless integration between their software and Microsoft Teams. Using these app integrations, users can access and interact with popular enterprise applications without leaving the context of Microsoft Teams. Users no longer need to switch between multiple dashboards and logins to access Jira, PowerBI, ServiceNow, Twitter, Jabber, ClickUp, Trello, Asana, MindMeister, Zoom, Cisco Webex, RingCentral, Adobe Creative Cloud, TeamViewer, Confluence, SharePoint, and many others.

Many of the Microsoft Teams integrations help bolster the “human element” of the team by gathering feedback, conducting virtual standup meetings, gauging employee morale, and awarding hard work through achievements and recognition. These technology solutions help build collaborative teams, whether these are in-person or virtual teams located worldwide.

This new cloud-based model for collaboration and communication is the way of the future. It allows businesses to have better access to talent, no matter where users are located and what role they play, and it helps to ensure the same tools for communication and collaboration are available to employees, no matter if they are working on-premises or remotely.

The post 10 Creative Ways to Integrate Teams Into Your Organization appeared first on Altaro DOJO | Microsoft 365.

There has been an explosion of project management tools and apps on the market. With the onset of a hybrid work layout, organizations have especially realized the benefits of using project management tools to organize, manage, plan, and capture ideas, progress, tasks, and other details. Microsoft provides several tools that can help organizations with task management. These include Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Tasks app for Teams, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project. It can be difficult to know which product to use with multiple products and overlapping features. Learn what the difference is between these tools and when to use which one.

Task Management in Microsoft 365

Like many software and cloud giants, Microsoft has many solutions, applications, and services that often overlap in their functionality, features, and capabilities. Microsoft To Do and Tasks, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project call all do similar things. However, deciding which one to use will come down to the type of projects a business manages and organizes.

These solutions from Microsoft are all designed to cater to different scenarios and diverge from one another when multiple people or teams are involved. If we could rank these tools from the order of simplest (1 being the simplest) to most complex in their abilities to manage tasks, projects, and teams, these would rank in the following order:

1. 1. Microsoft To Do
   2. Microsoft Tasks
   3. Microsoft Planner
   4. Microsoft Project

Let’s consider a description of each of the solutions.

• • Microsoft To Do – With Microsoft To Do, you can list your tasks and sort these for better focus on what’s important. You can create a “My Day” view of your daily tasks and create additional lists to organize your work projects, groceries, and any other custom lists you want to track. With the help of the Microsoft To Do app, you can keep track of what’s important for each day, and not lose track of important tasks.

• • Microsoft Planner – The Microsoft Planner application is a lightweight, mobile, and web-based app included with Office 365/Microsoft 365 business subscriptions. It allows your team to create “plans” that can consist of and assign tasks, chat about tasks, see charts of progress, and other features. Like many of the other Microsoft cloud-based applications, it provides easy integration and access from within Microsoft Teams and Microsoft SharePoint.

• • Microsoft Tasks app – The Microsoft Teams Task app bridges the gap between Microsoft To Do and Outlook with your team tasks from Planner. It allows you to easily see tasks assigned to you and cross these off once completed. In addition, you can change multiple tasks simultaneously if needed. With the Tasks app, you can work on To Do and Planner tasks next to your Teams channels, chats, and other apps inside Microsoft Teams that you are used to.

• • Microsoft Project – Microsoft Project can be accessed in three ways, including Project for the web, Project Desktop, and Project Online. Each of these has different types of capabilities, Microsoft Project for the web for example is a cloud-based app allowing you to create projects and collaborate on these with other users easily. It has three views, including Grid, Kanban-style board, and Gantt Timelines.

Microsoft has outlined some general recommendations on choosing the right Microsoft product to organize projects, tasks, to-do lists, etc. As mentioned, Microsoft To Do and Tasks, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project all have their strengths and preferred use cases.

Which solution aligns with which use case? Let’s consider the following considerations:

• • An individual project involving only one person – Individual task management is the simplest and most basic form of task management and to-do lists. If a single user needs to manage tasks and personal to-do lists, the Microsoft To Do and Tasks app is a great way to keep track of various items, tasks, etc.

• • A team project involving more than one person – If it is a team project where multiple users need to take part in tasks, to-do lists, and other details, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project are built for team projects

• • Suppose you only have a few deliverables and tasks that need to be managed. In that case, Microsoft Planner is well suited for this kind of project management, especially if it is a simple team project with very few tasks and other details that need to be managed.

• • You have a more complex project with many dependencies, costs, and intricate details – For more involved, difficult, and detailed projects, Microsoft Project is the best fit. While the other tools offered by Microsoft, such as Microsoft To Do and Tasks and Microsoft Planner, are capable of handling basic tasks and project management, Microsoft Project is the fully-featured 800-pound gorilla in terms of features and capabilities.

Microsoft Project Management Software: Pros and Cons for each

Each of the project management solutions from Microsoft have preferred use cases, and pros and cons. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each of the Microsoft project management solutions detailed so far – Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Tasks, and Microsoft Project.

Microsoft To Do

The Microsoft To Do app is a great little project management app that allows individuals to manage their daily tasks, lists, and other items, and perform light collaboration. This is the use case that really shines with this specific Microsoft project management application – managing tasks for a single individual person with the ability to share your tasks and lists and even assign some of these with others.

It is best suited for tasks or lists that relate to you individually as the collaboration features are not seamless and involve manual steps to collaborate with others. Not to say that you couldn’t keep up with tasks associated with work or other activities. It is just not the strong suit of Microsoft To Do.

Note the features of the app as found in the Microsoft Store:

With Microsoft To Do, you can:

• • Stay focused with My Day, a personalized daily planner with suggested tasks

• • Get your lists anywhere, on any device

• • Share lists and assign tasks with your friends, family, colleagues, and classmates

• • Personalize your lists with bold and colorful backgrounds

• • Set one-time or recurring due dates and reminders

• • Break your tasks into manageable steps

• • Add notes to any task

• • Attach files up to 25 MB to any task

• • Sync your tasks between Outlook and To Do

• • Group your lists together by topic or project

The official website for Microsoft To Do is found here: https://to-do.microsoft.com

Microsoft To Do

The interface is easy to navigate and intuitive and easily keeps up with many tasks. As you can see below, you can easily create customized lists with multiple tasks. You can set reminders, add due dates, repeat, and even assign tasks to others. As mentioned above, you can also add files of 25 MB or less to individual tasks.

Of course, there’s a mobile app for both Android and iOS so you can see your tasks on the go.

Creating a new list and tasks in Microsoft To Do

Pros:

• • Free to download

• • Easy to use

• • Intuitive

• • Great for personal tasks and light collaboration

• • Rated 4.7 in the Microsoft Store

• • Lots of functionality built into the app

• • It does not require a Microsoft 365 subscription

Cons:

• • Collaboration is not seamless

• • It does not scale well when many users need to collaborate on tasks

• • Not built for large projects and teams

Microsoft Tasks

The Microsoft Teams Tasks app is an application that helps to bring together tasks found in Microsoft To Do and Microsoft Outlook and integrate these with the Teams tasks found in Microsoft Planner. The look and feel of the Microsoft Teams Tasks app are very similar to what you see with Microsoft To Do.

With the Microsoft Tasks app for Teams, you will find the following:

• • My tasks: The My Tasks view includes the lists from your To Do app, including tasks you’ve added in To Do and Outlook, and tasks that have been assigned to you in Planner.

• • Shared plans: The Shared plans include the Planner plans added to Teams

You can also use the Tasks app to:

• • Add a plan to a Teams channel

• • Edit multiple tasks using List view

• • Get notifications about Planner tasks

The Microsoft Tasks app for Teams

Pros:

• • Very similar to Microsoft To Do

• • If users are familiar with To Do, that translates over to using the Microsoft Tasks app

• • Easy to add to Microsoft Teams

• • Provides synchronization of tasks from both To Do and Planner

• • Better integration for organizations than To Do

Cons:

• • Microsoft Teams is required

• • Assigning tasks is not as seamless as with Microsoft Planner

• • Confusion about when to use To Do and Microsoft Tasks app

Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner takes the capabilities of the To Do application for individuals and brings this to teams of users. It is lightweight and web-driven and allows teams of users to collaborate and maintain and work on task lists for various projects.

Microsoft Planner is more focused on the business realm as it is part of Microsoft 365. It allows organizations’ teams to use Microsoft 365 to create task plans for specific projects and assign tasks to Microsoft 365 users in the organization. When using the Microsoft Planner application, users login with their Microsoft 365 user accounts and seamlessly access Microsoft Planner. To log in to planner, users can visit the URL https://tasks.microsoft.com.

Users sign into Microsoft Planner using Microsoft 365 credentials

With Microsoft Planner, you create plans which then contain tasks. The tasks can be assigned to Microsoft 365 users.

Creating a new Microsoft Planner plan

On the task properties, you can use the Assign button to assign others in the organization to various tasks listed in the Plans.

You can also easily add an existing or new Planner plan to a Team to keep collaboration and task management in the same place.

Assigning Microsoft 365 users to Microsoft Planner tasks

Pros:

• • Easy to use

• • Web-driven

• • Easy integration with Microsoft Teams

• • Easily see all users as part of the Microsoft 365 organization

Cons:

• • Requires a Microsoft 365 subscription

• • Not for personal lists and tasks

• • It doesn’t provide the more in-depth project features included with Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project

For the most powerful and robust project management features from Microsoft, organizations should look at Microsoft Project. It is the top-of-the-line project management software used by enterprise organizations worldwide. While Microsoft has greatly simplified Project over the years, using it can still be overwhelming and require extensive training to realize the value and benefit from the platform. This aspect must be considered as part of the overall expense of introducing it into your organization.

Microsoft Project provides robust project management features for enterprise organizations

In addition, Microsoft offers Microsoft Project as both a cloud and on-premises offering.

Cloud versions:

• • Project Plan 1 – $10 user/month – Manage projects easily via the web browser. Does not include resource management, desktop client, portfolio selection and optimization, demand management, or enterprise resource planning and management

• • Project Plan 3 – $30 user/month – Allows executing and accessing projects through both web and desktop clients. It does not include portfolio selection and optimization, demand management, or enterprise resource planning and management

• • Project Plan 5 – $55 user/month – Includes all features as well as web and desktop client access

On-premises versions:

• • Project Standard 2021 – On-premises project management without collaboration tools and advanced features

• • Project Professional 2021 – On-premises project management solution without the ability to manage demand by capturing and evaluating project ideas through standardized processes or the ability to use advanced analytics

• • Project Server – Includes all features, except the ability to sync with Project Online and Project Server, or the ability to submit timesheets to capture project and nonproject time spent

Note the following access methods with Microsoft Project and what capabilities are found in each:

• • Project for the web – A cloud-based management app allowing you to create and collaborate on projects (both that you manage and are a part of). It provides the ability to see grid data, Kanban-style boards, and Gantt timelines

• • Project desktop – The Project desktop application is great for organizing work into phases, having dependencies between tasks, and other features for a single user or for publishing to a team

• • Project Online – The Project Online access is a web-based application that scales between small, medium, and large organizations. Managers can create schedules, assign tasks, and look at all projects across the board to see what everyone is working on

Pros:

• • Robust project management features

• • Ability to manage minute project details

• • Features not found in other Microsoft project management solutions

• • Both cloud-based and on-premises options

• • Web-based and desktop clients available

Cons:

• • Expensive

• • Generally requires training to benefit fully

• • It can take an extended time for organizations to benefit from Microsoft Project’s extensive features

Third-party alternatives to Microsoft’s solutions

While Microsoft provides many different solutions for project management that we have discussed so far, including Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Tasks app for Teams, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project. However, as mentioned, each solution has pros and cons and costs involved with the upper tiers of Microsoft project management solutions. There may be features or potential costs associated with the upper-level Microsoft solutions that do not align with an organization’s current business objectives. In addition, many organizations may not be subscribed to Office 365 or Microsoft 365 and may use another cloud SaaS solution.

There are third-party solutions that offer comparable features and solutions to the Microsoft project management solutions. What alternative solutions are available? Let’s take a look at the following:

• • Trello

• • Asana

• • ClickUp

• • Wrike

• • Todoist

Trello

Trello is a top-rated project management application that allows teams to collaborate, manage projects, and increase productivity. Trello allows creating Kanban-style boards, lists, and cards to manage projects and organize important tasks using a single tool.

Trello is a great alternative to Microsoft project management solutions

Trello is extremely affordable, intuitive, and provides easy collaboration features built into the platform compared to Microsoft Project. Mobile apps and full desktop clients allow interacting with the Trello solution on any device and while on the go. It also provides excellent collaboration and communication features such as tagging users, which automatically notifies them of the mention.

Asana

Asana is arguably one of the leaders in the project management space, providing a cloud-based project management platform that allows organizations to manage and keep track of all types of projects. These include simple projects to very complex projects with many components and details.

It provides the expected set of features, including lists, calendars, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and other features that most businesses look to have when managing, visualizing, and interacting with project tasks. It provides automated alerting and prioritization of tasks. Users can attach files and other resources to projects and provide rich interaction and collaboration between users.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a cloud-based project management platform gaining popularity as a project management solution. ClickUp includes a large number of features in a single, easy-to-use application. It also allows organizations to provide multiple views of pertinent task and project information to visualize these effectively.

ClickUp allows you to see to-do lists, Kanban boards, Gantt views, calendars, activities, mind maps, tables, and many others. It is highly customizable and provides status and color-coding of items and various themes.

ClickUp provides a robust project management solution with many different ways to view information

Wrike

Wrike is a modern, cloud-based project management solution that allows organizations to have centralized and robust project management features. Wrike helps project managers access project resources, time lines, tasks, progress achievements, dashboards, reports, and many other helpful tools.

It also provides many project templates that allow organizations and project managers to ramp up quickly with prebuilt frameworks for many different projects and tasks. Wrike also has over 400+ app integrations, including Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace.

Wrike Gantt view provides excellent visibility to project timelines

Todoist

Todoist provides a cloud-based task management application that allows creating projects, tasks, setting reminders, creating labels, collaboration features, and many other features. In addition to list-based tasks, you can also view tasks as Kanban-style cards that allow visualizing workflows.

You can also add tasks via email by forwarding emails into Todoist as tasks or comments. In addition, you can add file attachments, calendar feeds, productivity visualizations, and activity history. These features help teams manage projects and tasks with efficient collaboration.

Todoist provides effective task management and Kanban-style card visualizations

Microsoft project management solution FAQs

• • Can I get Microsoft Project for free? No. Microsoft Project is a paid product from Microsoft that can be purchased as a SaaS subscription offering per user/month. Microsoft Project is also available as an on-premises offering purchased as a server license.

• • Is Microsoft Project still used? Yes, Microsoft Project is a robust and fully-featured project management solution that has evolved over the years and has found its way to the cloud as a cloud-based solution, alongside the on-premises versions. Many organizations are still using Microsoft Project for their project management needs.

• • What’s the difference between Microsoft Project and Microsoft Planner? Microsoft Planner is a less complex project management tool that features Kanban boards and simple task management that is more appropriate for less complex and ad-hoc projects. It does provide collaboration features allowing team members to collaborate and work together effectively on projects. Microsoft Project is a much more complex and fully-featured product that is best suited for the most complex projects undertaken by organizations. Microsoft Project takes longer to get up to speed and requires considerable investment, both fiscally and in time, and training involved to realize benefits.

• • Did Planner replace Microsoft Project? No, Microsoft does not tout Planner as a direct replacement for Microsoft Project. Both Planner and Project cater to different use cases and have different strengths and weaknesses, as detailed above.

• • Can you integrate Microsoft Project with Planner? Microsoft has introduced various integrations between the two. For example, you can now link a task in Project Online to a Plan in Microsoft Planner if you have an Office/Microsoft 365 subscription that includes Planner.

Which one Should you Choose?

Microsoft provides many great project management solutions that cater to different businesses, project types, and use cases across the board. From the simplest, Microsoft To Do, to the most complex of the offerings, Microsoft Project, Microsoft covers the gamut of possibilities and project management needs with the various software offerings.

There are pros and cons to each Microsoft project management solution. Therefore, businesses must understand the intended use case of each software offering to realize the benefits and advantages of each. In addition, while the Microsoft project management solutions offer many great features, many alternative third-party solutions offer similar and often cheaper solutions, especially compared to Microsoft Project. Each business must choose the project management software solution that best aligns with their business use case and existing cloud SaaS subscriptions.

The post What’s the Best Task Mgmt App? Planner/To Do/Tasks/Project appeared first on Altaro DOJO | Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Viva may be a challenging topic or product to wrap our heads around since it’s not just one thing. It’s a family of products that together make an Employee Experience Platform. Microsoft Viva started to make sense during the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic for providing employee resources virtually or remotely.

Introducing Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva presents Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics as the first four pillars of a new Employee Experience Platform. Microsoft Viva is a platform since it is extensible via APIs and partner offers to be customized and built upon. The Microsoft Viva pillars are surfaced through the products that users are familiar with, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft SharePoint, etc., lowering friction and increasing familiarity. Microsoft Viva is meant to increase employee productivity within the context of a hybrid/remote/virtual user experience.

User experiences are customized for users using Microsoft AI technology to present information and news in their context. Microsoft Viva also uses data gained from employee behaviour to make recommendations for employee well-being and surface productivity information to managers.

Microsoft Viva components are not entirely new, as we will read further below, instead of assembled using existing Microsoft 365 technology and effective use of Microsoft AI.

We must also note that Microsoft Viva fits into your more extensive digital transformation journey. While we make this point later in this article, it is worth keeping in mind as we continue the journey that the Microsoft Viva suite fits into a more comprehensive digital adoption strategy and should not define it as a whole. We will start with why the Microsoft Viva suite of products exists – the User Experience Platform.

User Experience Platform – new buzzwords or new paradigm?

Before COVID-19, we congregated physically in buildings, offices, and headquarters. It was easy to talk about our employee experience since we had a place to go to, which allowed us to interact with our co-workers, make eye contact, read body language, and have coffee together. How we treated each other and how our manager treated us along with our shared experience and company culture while working together defined our employee experience. There is no doubt that it is easier to feel cared for when your teammate or manager can see how tired you are, hear the distress in your voice, or pick up on physical cues regarding your well-being. We need a new paradigm when we remove all possibilities of interacting physically and yet want to interact, measure wellness, share news, and increase productivity.

Creating and maintaining culture is easier if we can interact physically, transfer culture, share encouragement, and share knowledge. The “water cooler” conversation became a quick whiteboard discussion, or a “since we’re seeing each other, how do I…?” Knowledge sharing is complicated at the best of times when using digital-only means. In-person knowledge-sharing lowered that friction considerably; however, how do we knowledge share when in-person anything is discouraged or even forbidden during a pandemic.

Many platforms that don’t speak well to each other as part of our employee experience or even new-joiner onboarding experience are ok if there is someone who may sit next to us who can ask how to find the HR portal, or how would one capture a timesheet.

The new paradigm is a digital experience – little or no physical interaction – yet we are increasing employee wellbeing, surfacing productivity and wellness data to managers, maintaining or increasing a sense of connectedness as well as allowing employees to learn on the job, in the context of the work that they are doing. Add to that that we need a method of creating culture and connection for digital-only, office-bound, and hybrid workers who straddle both worlds – enter the Employee Experience Platform or EXP.

If we evaluate the pillars of Microsoft Viva in Technology terms only without the context of the thinking behind an Employee Experience Platform, then it will be difficult to articulate or even defend the possible value that Microsoft Viva can produce for the license cost.

In the following sections, we look at the different pillars of Microsoft Viva, using both technical and User Experience Platform lenses.

Microsoft Viva Connections

Microsoft defines viva Connections as “The gateway to your employee experience.” Using Microsoft SharePoint intranet experiences, Yammer communities, Stream video, and Teams live events; Viva Connections customizes relevant news, conversations, and company resources into a user-specific view. Companies can target and schedule content towards departments and people groups.

Since SharePoint powers Viva Connections, i.e., a SharePoint Intranet presented as a Microsoft Teams App, it looks great for desktop and mobile users.

In an 8-step process for implementing Viva Connections, Microsoft documents the steps for an administrator to publish a customized SharePoint Intranet as the Microsoft Viva Connections app via the Microsoft Teams admin center. The image below details the steps required.

In summary, Microsoft Viva Connections is a well-crafted SharePoint Intranet, surfaced in Teams. However, we can miss the point of the Intranet entirely if we don’t consider the Employee Experience Platform intent.

Experientially, working for an organization evokes generally positive emotions if based on robust and positive connections. We like belonging and being part of something. Microsoft Viva Connections should define the digital experience as our organizations’ daily or even hourly entry point. Seeing a birthday acknowledged and celebrated, finding the town-hall meetings, and targeted and personalized communications is how we want to think when crafting the Intranet that becomes the entry point to our cultural portrayal of company culture using digital means.

If you think this sounds harder than the marketing suggests, you may be right. Microsoft Viva Connections is a framework of digital enablement, which forces us to think about how content is perceived through the lens of creating and maintaining connection and then culture.

Microsoft Viva Insight

Data-driven and AI-based, Microsoft Viva creates Personal, Manager, Leader, and Advanced insights.

The AI-powered nature of insights is displayed to the end-user using Microsoft Outlook via the daily briefing email and a Microsoft Teams app. This feature shared branding with Microsoft Cortana, adding some confusion to users hoping to use Cortana on Mobile or Windows to enable or disable it.

AI scrapes our mailboxes looking for action words, which can be turned into reminders or tasks. This summary email often reminds us of things we should have scheduled but didn’t. The Briefing email also allows us to schedule focus time, plan our weeks, block out time to catch up with our team, etc., often including data on how well or how badly we have planned or executed our productivity plans. Due to the data-driven nature of the product, chatting during meetings, working after hours, etc., are tracked and reported. When presented to managers, none of this information is ever personally identifiable.

Manager, Leader, and Advanced insights report on work patterns, work culture, and employee engagements using different lenses and emphases on the data at hand. We can see how this data for individuals and managers can be surfaced as part of an Employee Experience Platform to raise awareness of and manage burnout. The individual and organizational lenses of the same data create an understanding of work patterns and over-commitment, which could be missed in a digital-only or hybrid-working workflow.

After licenses are deployed, Microsoft Viva Insights is turned on by default, although Microsoft recommends an adoption strategy to communicate which features are deployed to end-users.

Microsoft Viva Learning

Knowledge workers tend to enjoy learning and learning in the context of the task or tools they are using. Microsoft Viva Learning fits directly into the Employee Experience Platform since the individual may have used Microsoft Viva Insights to block time out of their calendars to improve their knowledge and increase their sense of accomplishment and well-being. Career development can be part of the regular users working day.

Microsoft Viva is used in Microsoft Teams allowing users to learn on the job, without taking a week from work to attend a class, using Microsoft and third-party providers, including LinkedIn Learning.

Microsoft Viva Topics

Microsoft Viva Topics used to be called Microsoft Viva Knowledge. It attempts to solve the collating and preserve the intellectual property generated by companies and individuals to be made available as topics and insights.

Microsoft Viva Topics use Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Search, Microsoft AI, and other components to form the service. AI is used to search for and identify topics to which knowledge can be attached, amended, or edited by a knowledge manager. These topics are made visible using highlighted and actionable cards in SharePoint Online and search results using online and Microsoft Office-based searches.

Potentially the most ethereal of problems to solve, the preservation and dissemination of knowledge is critical to our user experience. Working in a digital-only manager, frustration can easily mar our days by not knowing what specific words mean or where to find the knowledge to do our work.

The Employee Experience Platform attempts to make knowledge available when required by providing it in the context of the user experience, i.e., browsing a SharePoint page without leaving the application.

Microsoft Viva for Government Cloud

Microsoft Viva is available with more features to both Government Cloud instances, GCC and GCC High. Note the Public roadmap announcements https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap with the Cloud instance filters set GCC and GCC High.

Microsoft Viva Pricing

Microsoft Viva Suite is available at USD 9.00 per user per month or USD 4.00 per user per month for each individual component. Pricing information, as well as which features are bundled vs. which features require additional add-ons, is documented by Microsoft.

Microsoft Viva suite and Microsoft viva individual components cannot be purchased without base licensing, including:

• • Microsoft 365 F1, F3, E3, A3, E5, and A5

• • Office 365 F3, E1, A1, E3, A3, E5, and A5

• • Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, and Business Premium

• • SharePoint K, Plan 1, or Plan 2

A Microsoft Viva license is required for the use of any Microsoft viva components, with the following caveats:

• • Viva Learning

A license is required for anyone who wants to access partner content and learn management systems or recommend content and track completion progress.

• • Viva Insights

Personal insights are available to Microsoft 365 users without requiring a separate Viva Insights license. Premium personal insights, manager insights, and leader insights, as well as advanced insights, are available to users with a Viva Insights license.

• • Viva Topics

A license is required for anyone viewing, accessing, or curating topic cards, topic pages, topic centers, or otherwise benefiting from Viva Topics capabilities.

• • Viva Connections

Viva Connections is currently available to all Microsoft 365 or Office 365 enterprise plan users without requiring a separate license.

Microsoft Viva Roadmap

Microsoft Viva is an evolving product, as evidenced by the recent acquisition of ally.io to create the fifth pillar, which was not named at the time of writing. Ally.io is an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) company, which fits into the ethos of Microsoft Viva to assist both employees and managers, and leaders to instrument the digital user experience. Not much is known at the time of writing of the specifics or pricing model of the new model, post-integration; however, the market expectation is that Microsoft will grow Microsoft Viva features both organically and by acquisition, like ally.io.

The new capabilities of ally.io will be integrated into the Microsoft Viva suite in 2022.

The feature roadmap for all of Viva is available to view by clicking on the Product dropdown and ticking Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva is extensible, with Partner integrations available for Viva Learning, Viva Connections, and Viva Insights. A growing list of current and future partners may be viewed here.

Getting Started with Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva is an inter-related suite of Microsoft products using Microsoft 365 components. We may choose to deploy only a part of Microsoft Viva, such as Microsoft Viva Learning, or we can deploy all of it. Adoption and change management for a digital journey is not a quick or a light topic; similarly, the deployment of an Employee Experience Platform requires coordination and thought about the intent of what the organization wishes to achieve with each component, and critically how the parts should lead the user through a positive experience. Microsoft Viva Connections springs to mind as the most immediate component requiring thought and customization, followed by Microsoft Viva Insights.

Microsoft Viva documentation is a great place to start the implementation journey, remembering that Microsoft Viva Components and the Microsoft Viva suite are tools in the User Experience strategy and not the strategy itself.

The post How Powerful Really is Microsoft Viva? appeared first on Altaro DOJO | Microsoft 365.

This article focuses on administration and management exclusively for OneDrive for Business. We will cover advice and best practices from my extensive experience working with service ideal for system admins and those actively working with it on a daily basis.

What is Microsoft OneDrive?

Microsoft has two different, but similar services called OneDrive, both of which offer cloud file storage for users. A free version of OneDrive is available to everyone and is often called the “consumer” version. The business version is “OneDrive for Business” and requires a subscription to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. Both look a lot alike but are managed very differently. To add to the mix, Microsoft often refers to OneDrive for Business as simply “OneDrive” in their documentation and even in the UI.
Note: I may refer to OneDrive instead of OneDrive for Business from time to time in this article for the sake of brevity, but I always mean OneDrive for Business unless otherwise stated.

OneDrive for Business has company-wide administration in mind. A service administrator can control the deployment of the synchronization app, network performance, and many other settings. With OneDrive (consumer), there is no management framework. The individual using the service controls their settings.

Where Should Users Save Files?

OneDrive for Business makes it very easy to share files with others, but if you find yourself sharing lots of files, it is recommended to use Teams or SharePoint instead. Teams and SharePoint are simply better for collaboration. For example, with OneDrive, you can’t check-in and check-out a document. Also, in Teams, any document you upload to Teams is available to the entire Team by default, whereas documents you upload to OneDrive are private by default. Also, in Teams, a conversation about a document is shared in a Teams channel rather than via email. The general guidance is if you are working on a file without others involved use OneDrive for Business. If you need others involved, use a more collaborative service – Teams or SharePoint.

OneDrive for Business uses SharePoint Online as Service

As the service administrator, one of the most important concepts to master is that OneDrive for Business is a special purpose SharePoint document library created automatically for every user in your company. When a user is assigned an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 license, the services automatically create a personal OneDrive for Business document library.

The URL for OneDrive for Business is formatted as follows:

https://<company base name>-my.sharpoint.com/personal/<user-id>

The landing page (shown above) for OneDrive for Business shows “My Files” which are your files. You can also navigate from here to any SharePoint asset, including SharePoint Document Libraries, files hosted for Teams, or other SharePoint content.

Now that you know OneDrive for Business is using SharePoint under the hood, the following guidance makes sense:

To manage the OneDrive sharing settings for your organization, use the Sharing page of the new SharePoint admin center, instead of the Sharing page in the OneDrive admin center. It lets you manage all the settings and latest features in one place.

In this way, settings related to file sharing on SharePoint are aligned with those for OneDrive for Business (and Teams, which also uses SharePoint as a file store). OneDrive picks up many features from SharePoint, such as the ability to do File Restores, Restore a previous version of file, and synchronize files to your desktop.

Easy Anonymous Access

One main reason OneDrive for Business is well-liked is that it’s so easy to share a document with anyone. You can send someone a URL to a document and relax. It just works, and you won’t hear the dreaded “I can’t open the document” (which is all too common and a huge productivity sink).

The screenshot below exemplifies my point. What’s being shown is the side-by-side sharing experience in Teams vs. OneDrive. Take note! There is no Share option in Teams. You can copy the link to the file, but you must know if the user you send it to has rights to view the document in the Teams library. In OneDrive for Business, however, there is a Share option that allows you to send a URL to anyone. This is called Anonymous Access and is one of the primary reasons users share from OneDrive rather than Teams.

Also, in OneDrive, if you click on Anyone with the link can edit, you can further refine the Sharing options.

As a side note, users frustrated by Teams’ lack of sharing controls can easily open a document or folder in SharePoint instead of Teams (as shown below). In SharePoint, you can share the file with anyone just like in OneDrive. There’s no need to copy a file in Teams to OneDrive to share anonymously. Just open it in SharePoint instead!

<>Controlling Default Permissions

Many businesses prefer to control who can open company documents. You can change the default settings in the OneDrive administration center, but let’s follow Microsoft’s advice to use SharePoint administration instead.

There are separate controls for External Sharing for SharePoint and OneDrive, ranging from Only people in your Organization to Anyone. However, what a static snapshot does not reveal is that the OneDrive settings cannot be more permissive than SharePoint. If you lower the permission on SharePoint, the permission also lowers on OneDrive. OneDrive can be more restrictive than SharePoint but never less restrictive. Since SharePoint hosts OneDrive files, this makes sense.

These settings are company-wide. Let users know before you make changes to global settings that cause changes in expected behavior. You WILL hear from them, and it generally won’t be a happy face emoji.

When guest users are needed, as they frequently are, consider securing the environment with the guidance provided by Microsoft in the documentation page titled Create a secure guest sharing environment.

Savvy admins can control sharing using options available when you click on More external sharing settings on the same screen shown above:

The option Limit external sharing by domain lets you allow or deny sharing to a particular domain. This can be a great way to go when you want to constrain sharing to a specific set of partners or external resources.

Allow only users in specific security groups to share externally lets you control who can share files with people outside your organization. A security group is an Azure AD object that is generally a collection of users and other groups. After populating the security group with users, you can assign permissions and policies to the group, such as granting the group access to a SharePoint site, a mailbox, or forcing members of the group to use 2-factor authentication.

Consider the following scenario. Marketing is involved with a lot of external sharing, so we want to enable sharing for members of Marketing but deny everyone else, AND we don’t want to have to make adjustments every time someone moves into or out of marketing.

To illustrate how this can be achieved with security groups, I created a security group in Azure AD named Marketing-Org and added four users. As employees come and go, members of marketing are added to and removed from this group. (If you haven’t created security groups in Azure AD, it’s straightforward.)

Next, (shown below) I created another security group called External-Sharing.

Security groups can have other security groups as members! By adding Marketing-Org to External-Sharing, the users in Marketing-Org automatically inherit External-Org permissions and policies

After that, I assigned the sharing permissions to the External-Org group. Returning to the SharePoint admin center Policies->Sharing->More external sharing settings-> Allow only users in specific security groups to share externally. Then, by clicking on Manage Security Groups (shown below), I added the External-Sharing group and set them so they can share with Anyone. To limit the ability of everyone else, I added the built-in security group Everyone except external users and set them to share with Authenticated guests only.

In this way, everyone in the company can only share with authenticated guests, whereas only the members of External-Sharing can share with anyone.

The screenshot below shows the result. The user on the left is not a member of the External-Sharing group (the Anyone option is grey and cannot be selected). However, the user on the right can.

Once configured, effective administrators can manage membership of the security groups using PowerShell with the Add-AzureADGroupMember and associated cmdlets.

Storage space per user

Most Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans come with 1TB of storage per user for OneDrive. If there are more than 5 users on a plan, 1TB can be increased by administrators to 5TB. You can even go to 25TB on a user-by-user basis by filing a support ticket with Microsoft.

To increase the storage limit for all users, browse to the OneDrive administration console, and select Storage. Change the setting from 1024 to the new limit. Shown below is updating the limit to 5TB. There are no additional charges for the increase in capacity.

A global or SharePoint admin can change storage quotas with PowerShell after you connect to SharePoint using the SharePoint Online Management Shell and run the following command:

Set-SPOSite -Identity <user’s OneDrive URL> -StorageQuota <quota>.

You have to construct the OneDrive URL from the company name and user name, as mentioned earlier. Then, find the user name from the list of active users in the Office or Microsoft 365 admin center.

For <Quota>, enter a number between 1024 (1MB is the minimum) and 5242880 (for 5 TB). Values are rounded up. 1TB is 1048576.

As of this writing, OneDrive allows files up to 100GB.

Request Files

In some scenarios, you may want to collect files from others, rather than send files to others. OneDrive for Business makes this easy with the Request Files feature. With this feature, users can send an email asking others to upload content to a specific folder.

To set up a request files email, in the OneDrive UI, select a folder, click on the ellipses (…), and click Request files. You will see a window similar to the one shown below.

After clicking Next, you will see the Send file request window:

The email sent by this form provides a URL for uploading content to the OneDrive for Business folder. Request files is a great way to collect and concentrate needed files into a single location for processing. That said, you need to make sure to enable uploads for the folder locations in the request.

Of course, a savvy administrator is thinking, “Hmm, does this provide a way for these users to upload content forever to this location?”

Shown below is the SharePoint admin center for Policies, Sharing.

With these settings, you can put some boundaries around the ability to upload files to location access given in the Request files invitation. These settings apply to anonymous links sent from OneDrive and SharePoint as well. As a best practice, if you permit users to send links to Anyone, which is enabled by default, you should expire those links. Otherwise, over a period of years, there can be hundreds or thousands of URLs that provide access to your content making access control distressingly challenging or impossible without disabling anonymous access altogether.

Folders must be set to View, edit, and upload as shown above to allow users to upload files in response to a file request.

Synchronization

One of the main features of OneDrive for Business is the ability to synchronize files from a user’s PC or laptop with OneDrive. With the synch service running, users can work on files locally, and the changes are sent to the cloud. Also, well-known folder locations such as Documents can be synchronized, ensuring essential documents are both local and in the cloud. You can easily sync Teams File Repositories as well as SharePoint Document Libraries.

The synchronization service is part of Windows 10, so you do not generally need to download it individually. Users can install the service by clicking Start and typing OneDrive.

Click on the OneDrive app to launch the setup. OneDrive is then accessible in the taskbar as the cloud icon (shown before logging in, below).

Alternatively, users can enable the client by logging into onedrive.microsoft.com and clicking Sync.

When installed, users can enjoy the integration of OneDrive with Windows File Explorer. A OneDrive location is visible in the File listing. The OneDrive file listing is unique as you can see if a file is in the cloud (cloud icon), local and in the cloud (checkmark), or synchronizing (arrows). Also, when you right-click on a file in the OneDrive folder, you can Share a file, View online, and check the version history.

Pay particular attention to the following icons. Shown below is a screenshot from one that appears during the installation of the OneDrive client.

TAKE NOTE – File on demand enabled by default!

Imagine this scenario. You are working on an important project with several others. A Teams site is used for collaboration. You’re headed out for an important meeting with your clients, and a colleague posts several important files to Teams. You’ve installed the sync client, and you’re headed off to the airport, so you think “no worries, I’ve got them synced to my laptop, and I can view them in flight.” Aloft, you open your laptop and see there is a cloud icon next to files. Clicking on a file, it’s not accessible. What happened?

What happened is the Files On-Demand is enabled by default.

Files On-Demand marks content that appears in the cloud as cloud-only. A file added to a Teams File Repository will not automatically sync locally. It’s not available offline until you open the file, or set the file or folder to Always keep on this device. Optionally, you could also disable Files On-Demand, which we’ll get to in a minute.

For an important file or folder, right-click in Windows Explorer and select Always keep on this device. Users can also disable Files On-Demand in the OneDrive client by opening the client and clicking More->Settings->Settings, then clear the checkbox that reads Files On-Demand.

When you clear the checkbox, a pop-up message says that, indeed, the files will download to your PC instead of being cloud-only.

Be advised that as the message above states, if your files in OneDrive for Business take up, say, 1TB, then that 1TB will be downloaded to your PC. Local storage needs to allow for this. Also, administrators need to consider the impact on bandwidth should you disable Files On-Demand for many users at the same time.

As an alternative, consider instructing users to mark files and folders they want to always be available offline “Always available on this device” using Windows File Explorer as previously discussed. Then you can keep Files On-Demand enabled to preserve bandwidth as only the designated files and folder will be permanently synched, while those you open, will be temporarily synched. All others will reside in the cloud.

Using Policy

For small businesses, administrators can manage OneDrive for Business effectively with the OneDrive for Business administration console. Larger organizations will be interested in using policy. The policy system for Microsoft and Office 365 is considered the most efficient way to manage many settings including those for OneDrive for Business. Policy-based administration provides administrators control, scale, repeatability, and flexibility.

Policy automation can be a complicated topic and breaks into different scenarios depending on your network architecture and configuration. For those with on-premise Active Directory environments, you manage policy via SCCM or Azure AD Domain Services.

If your environment is cloud-only (meaning, you are not using domain controllers locally), using Microsoft’s InTune service lets you deploy the OneDrive sync service to desktops using the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center.

You can also create and apply profiles to users that control OneDrive behavior. Shown below is a policy profile limiting the client upload rate to a percentage of available bandwidth. This one of many possible settings to control OneDrive policies in Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Previously, you saw how you can limit sharing with anonymous users to members of a specific security group. Similarly, you can apply different policy profiles to different security groups.

In this way, you manage the behavior of OneDrive and many other aspects of your cloud service by membership in security groups. It’s easy to imagine uses for this practice with a group for New Hires, Legal-Review-Team, Alliance Partners, Vendors, or other typical roles with differing needs in a busy organization.

Network Impact

In regards to OneDrive, you want to be thoughtful about bandwidth consumption in your company, especially on the initial deployment of OneDrive for Business. More than one company has had issues with essential business services becoming sluggish when hundreds or even thousands of newly deployed OneDrive for Business sync clients start downloading content at the same time. Files On-Demand, as discussed earlier, helps significantly to reduce the initial bandwidth hit as files located in the cloud are not automatically downloaded to clients when enabled.

Known folder moves (discussed next) can also impact network performance by automatically uploading users’ local folders to the cloud when the client is deployed.

To help manage network impacts, the OneDrive sync client has bandwidth controls built-in. For a small business, you may want to adjust these settings on each users’ system. Right-click on the OneDrive for Business sync client, then click Settings->Network to see the settings.

In a larger business, you can use policy to push the desired settings, including the ability to mark OneDrive network traffic with QoS settings.

Known Folder Moves

Finally, a feature called Known Folder Moves is of keen interest to administrators as it can help reduce support desk calls and ease users’ transitions to new computers when replaced or upgraded.

As you probably know, specific folders in Windows, such as Documents, Desktop, and Pictures, and others are unique. These are “known folders” as they are in the same location in the file system on every Windows operating system.

OneDrive includes a feature where known folder locations are synced to OneDrive for Business. When a user needs a file in one of these locations and their PC is not available, they can access it from any device, including a mobile device that has an internet connection. Also, when a user moves to a new PC or laptop, all the previous documents, images, and important files are online and can easily be synched back to the new device.

Known Folder Moves can be enabled in the sync client by clicking on Setting->Backup->Manage Backup.

Of course, you can also use policy with the methods previously discussed. Should you decide to roll this out, be mindful of bandwidth impacts and network performance, all that content will be uploaded to the cloud.

Summary

OneDrive for Business is an exceptionally useful service. In this article, we’ve discussed many of the key considerations, benefits, best practices, and capabilities of OneDrive for Business so you can effectively manage the service for users. A capable administrator will understand the business use cases for sharing as well as the network impact of OneDrive for Business, and be familiar with how to administer the service including using policy to enforce the desired settings for your Business.

When set up, users will enjoy cloud access to essential files, including their Desktop, Document, Pictures, Team sites, and other files of importance, allowing them to share content quickly and work locally or collaboratively.

Of course, Microsoft is continuously updating OneDrive for Business, so as a last tip, bookmark the Microsoft official OneDrive blog to keep up-to-date.

The post OneDrive for Business: Tips and Tricks for High-Performing Admins appeared first on Altaro DOJO | Microsoft 365.

As part of your organization’s journey to the cloud / digital transformation, document storage is key. Microsoft OneDrive for Business (OD4B) replaces the traditional local “Documents” folder and opens up access to work on documents from anywhere, on any device, from the OneDrive app, along with many other capabilities.

This article will look at what Microsoft OneDrive for Business is, how it compares with personal OneDrive, how to use OD4B, protecting your files and sharing them with others securely, and some tips for Microsoft 365 administrators managing OD4B for a business. If you’d like an overview on how to use OneDrive for Business, I’ve made the video below, which accompanies this article:

The Basics of OneDrive for Business

Microsoft OneDrive for Business is SharePoint-based cloud storage that you license as part of Office / Microsoft 365 that gives each user 1 TB of storage (at the most basic levels, unlimited for higher-level plans) for their documents. You can access these documents from any Windows or Mac computer (OneDrive for Mac), as well as through apps for Android and iOS. As a note, the client is built into Windows 10, 1709, or later but is also available for earlier versions. You can also access OneDrive storage in any web browser. You can quickly get there by logging in at www.office.com and clicking on the OneDrive icon.

OD4B in Office.com

Alternatively, you can right-click on the folder in Windows Explorer on your desktop and select View online.

Right-click on OD4B in Windows Explorer

Either way, you end up in the OneDrive Microsoft web interface where you can create new Office documents, upload files or folders, sync the content between your machine and the cloud storage (see below), and create automation flows through Power Automate. Through the Microsoft OneDrive for Business web interface, you also have access to the “file versions” functionality to restore previous versions of your files. (see below under the Advanced features)

OD4B web interface

Note that if you click on an Office file in the web interface, it’ll open in the web-based version of Word, giving you the option of working on any device where you have access to a browser.

For most people, 1 TB of storage is sufficient, but many modern devices don’t come with that amount of internal storage, so you may need to choose what to sync to the local device. Understanding how to sync OneDrive between the cloud and local storage is straightforward.

There are two approaches, you can right-click on a folder or file and select Always keep on this device which will do exactly that (and take up space on your local PC), or Free up space which will delete the local copy but keep the files in the cloud. You can tell the different states with the filled green tick (always on this device) icon, or the white cloud (space freed up). The automatic way is to simply double-click on a file that you need to work on, and the file will be downloaded (green tick on white background), called Available locally. This feature is called Files on demand.

In Windows, there’s also a handy “pop up” menu to see the status of OneDrive for Business, see which files have been recently synced, and also lets you pause syncing temporarily.

Pop up menu from OD4B client

If you’re working in Word, Excel, PowerPoint in both Windows and Mac on a file stored in Microsoft OneDrive for Business (and OneDrive personal / SharePoint Online), it’ll AutoSave your changes without you having to save manually. OneDrive for Business will also become the default save location in Word, Excel, etc.

And the “secret” is that OneDrive for Business is a just a personal document library in SharePoint Online, managed by the OneDrive Microsoft service.

Choosing syncing options for folders

OneDrive versus OneDrive for Business

If you sign up for a free Microsoft account, you get the personal flavor of OneDrive storage which provides 5GB of storage. There are additional paid plans worth noting for the personal version of OneDrive storage. These include:

• • OneDrive Standalone 100GB – 100 GB storage at $1.99/mo

• • Microsoft 365 Personal – 1 TB OneDrive 365 storage – $69.99/yr and also includes full Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

• • Microsoft 365 Family – $99.99/yr includes 1 TB of storage for (6) people – 6 TB total

From an end-user point of view, the services are very similar, but the business version adds identity federation, administrative control, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and eDiscovery.

Advanced Features

OneDrive for Business provides quite a few advanced features that the casual user might not know about. For instance, when you’re attaching a document to an email, you’ll have the option to attach a link to the document in your OneDrive for Business instead of a copy of it. If you’re emailing the document to someone internally in your business or someone externally that you collaborate with, this is a better option as you’ll both still be working on the one file (potentially at the same time, see below) rather than having multiple copies attached to different emails and ending up having to manually reconcile the edits at the end.

Known Folder Move is another feature that you can enable as an administrator. This will redirect the Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Screenshots and Camera Roll folders from a user’s local device to OneDrive for Business.

This has two benefits; firstly, if a user loses their device or it’s broken, their files will still be there when they log in on a new device, secondly, they can use their local Documents, Pictures, etc. folders as they always have.

Known Folder Move can be controlled on-premises using Group Policy from Active Directory Domain Services. In addition, Microsoft Intune configuration profiles can be used to configure and control Known Folder Move for hybrid connected end-user clients.

There’s also versioning built into OneDrive for Business which keeps track of each version as it’s saved, you can access this either in the web interface or by right-clicking on a file in Windows Explorer.

OD4B document versions

The Recycle bin in the web UI for OneDrive for Business has saved many an IT Pro’s career when the CEO has deleted (“by mistake” – but they swear they never hit delete) an important file. Simply click on the Recycle bin and restore files that were deleted up to 93 days ago (up to 30 days for OneDrive personal). A related feature is OneDrive Restore that lets you recover an entire (or parts of) OneDrive for Business, perhaps after all the files have been encrypted by a ransomware attack. It also shows a histogram of versions for each file, making it easy to spot the version you want to restore.

Using AI, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business will automatically extract text from photos that you store so that you can use it when searching for files, it’ll also automatically provide a transcript for any audio or video file you store. File insights let you see who has viewed and edited a shared file (see below) and get statistics.

If you’re using the app on your smartphone, you can scan the physical world (a whiteboard, a document, business card, or photo) with the camera and it’ll use AI to transcribe the capture.

Scanning in the Android app

Recently, Microsoft added a new feature called Add to OneDrive that lets you add a shortcut in OneDrive for Business to folders that others have shared with you or that are shared with you in Teams or SharePoint. Speaking of Teams – sharing files in there will now use the same sharing links functionality that OneDrive for Business uses (see below). Even more useful will be the forthcoming ability to move a folder and keep the sharing permissions you have configured for it, and some files (CAD drawings anyone?) the increase of the maximum file size from 15 GB to 100 GB is welcome. And, like all the other cool kids, OneDrive for Business (and OneDrive personal) on the web will add a dark theme option. More at OneDrive for Business tips and tricks

Collaboration and OneDrive for Business

One of the powerful features of OneDrive for Business is the ability to share documents (and folders) with internal and external users. As you might expect, administrators have full control over sharing options (see below). But assuming it’s not turned off or restricted you can right-click on a file or folder and click the blue cloud icon Share option, or click the Share option in the web interface. This lets you share a link to the file or folder with internal and external users, grant access to specific people, make it read-only or allow editing and block the ability to download the document (they have to edit the online, shared copy).

Sharing a file

It’s a good idea to turn on external sharing notifications via email.

Once a document is shared you can also use Co-authoring to work on the document simultaneously, both in the web-based versions of Word and Excel as well as the desktop versions of the Office apps. You can see which parts of a document another user is working on.

Sharepoint vs OneDrive

As mentioned earlier, the OneDrive for Business service is built on top of SharePoint Online infrastructure. Does this mean you have SharePoint Online by default with OneDrive for Business? No, SharePoint Online provides many more features and functionalities outside of file storage.

SharePoint Online is a behemoth product that can do many things. Traditionally, organizations have used SharePoint for creating intranet and extranet web sites for collaboration. Sharepoint Online contains all of the features of OneDrive for Business from a file storage perspective, but many other features such as calendaring, content management features, more robust collaboration, and dashboards, just to name a few. Still, it requires a proper SharePoint backup, read more: Why You Should be Backing up SharePoint Now

SharePoint Online is a much more comprehensive solution used for enterprise services and collaboration compared to OneDrive for Business that is primarily centered on file storage.

OneDrive for Business Apps Integrations

Microsoft has a large ecosystem of third-party vendor integration across the entire ecosystem of cloud Software-as-a-Service solutions. There are OneDrive for Business apps available to integrate with OneDrive for Business. Like other cloud SaaS integrations, OneDrive for Business apps are third-party applications that extend the built-in functionality for the Microsoft cloud applications.

The OneDrive for Business apps integrations includ AI+Machine Learning, analytics, collaboration, commerce, compliance & legal, customer service, finance, productivity, project management, and many others. You can learn more about OneDrive for Business apps integrations here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onedrive/apps-that-work-with-onedrive

Administration

If you’re the administrator for your Office 365/Microsoft 365 deployment you can access the SharePoint admin center (from the main Microsoft 365 Admin center) and control sharing for both OneDrive and SharePoint. There is also a link to the OneDrive for Business admin center where you have control over other settings, including sharing settings.

Sharing Settings in OD4B Admin Center

The main settings for you to consider here are who your users can share content with. The most permissive setting allows them to share links to documents with anyone, no authentication required (not recommended). The next level up allows your users to invite external users to the organization but they have to sign in (using the same email address that the sharing link was sent to), creating an external user in your Azure Active Directory and thus giving you some control, including the ability to apply Conditional Access to their access. If you only allow sharing with existing external users, you must have another process in place for how to invite external users. And the most restrictive is to only allow sharing with internal users, blocking external sharing. Don’t be fooled by these sliders however, if you set this too restrictive and users need to share documents externally, they will do so using personal email, other cloud storage solutions, etc. They will just not be using OneDrive for Business sharing links which at least allows you visibility in audit logs and reports, along with some control.

Under the advanced settings for the links you can configure link expiry in days, prohibiting links that last “forever”. You can also limit links to be view only. The advanced settings for sharing let you black or whitelist particular domains for sharing, preventing further sharing (an external user sharing with another external user) and letting owners see who is viewing their files.

Under Sync you can limit syncing to domain-joined computers and block specific file types. Storage lets you limit the storage quota and set the number of days that OneDrive for Business content is kept after a user account is deleted. Device access lets you limit access based on IP address as well as set some restrictions for the mobile apps, whereas the Compliance blade has links to DLP, Retention, eDiscovery, Alerts, and Auditing, all of which are generic Office 365 features. The next blade, Notifications, controls email notifications for sharing and the last blade, while Data migration is a link to an article with tools for migrating to OneDrive for Business from on-premises storage.

If you’re considering OneDrive for Business, there are handy deployment and administration guides for administrators, both for Enterprises and Small businesses. If, on the other hand, your business is definite about keeping “stuff” on-premises you can use OneDrive with SharePoint server, including 2019.

Note that a recent announcement means that the OneDrive for Business admin center functionality will move into the SharePoint Online admin center, but the above functionality will stay intact, just not in a separate portal.

OneDrive for Business sync issue troubleshooting

There are times when users may experience a OneDrive for Business sync issue. The following are a few basic troubleshooting steps to troubleshoot OneDrive for Business sync problems. These include:

• • Make sure OneDrive for Business is updated to the latest version on the client – You can check the version of OneDrive for Business by right-clicking the icon in the system tray.

• • Reboot – Often synchronization issues or errors can be resolved with a simple reboot of a workstation if OneDrive for Business is experiencing errors

• • Resolve conflicts – If files are in conflict due to issues saving or merging the conflicts, you may need to “save a copy” to OneDrive instead of merging changes.

• • Clear cached files in the Microsoft Upload Center – Clearing cached copies in the Microsoft Upload Center can help resolve issues uploading and synchronizing

• • Stop and resync the libraries – If multiple files are in error, stopping and resyncing the libraries can be effective.

• • Resolve credential issues – Incorrect user credentials can cause OneDrive for Business sync issues

• • Repair OneDrive for Business or uninstall/reinstall – If all else fails, repair or uninstall/reinstall OneDrive for Business.

Microsoft has a detailed KB on the subject of troubleshooting OneDrive for Business sync problems here.

How to disable OneDrive for Business

Some organizations may want to disable OneDrive if they use another cloud storage solution. This can help prevent end-user confusion as to where files are located. In Windows 10 & 11, the Microsoft OneDrive app is automatically installed.

However, the Microsoft OneDrive app can be totally removed from Windows 10 & 11 using the Settings > Apps & Features utility.

Uninstalling Microsoft OneDrive from a Windows 10 workstation

Once removed, the Microsoft OneDrive system tray icon and program entry will be gone without the possibility of users accessing, configuring, signing in, etc.

To properly protect your Hyper-V virtual machines, use Altaro VM Backup to securely backup and replicate your virtual machines. We work hard perpetually to give our customers confidence in their Hyper-V backup strategy.

To keep up to date with the latest Hyper-V best practices, become a member of the Hyper-V DOJO now (it’s free).

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that cloud storage is a cornerstone of successful digital transformation and if you’re already using Office 365, OneDrive for Business is definitely the best option.

The post Why You Should Use OneDrive for Business appeared first on Altaro DOJO | Microsoft 365.

If you work as a consultant, engineer or have another role that requires a lot of customer contact and scheduling of meetings you know the struggle of managing it all.

• • You spend a lot of time finding slots in your calendar to send time options to your customers.

• • Then you spend more time managing blocked out times or chasing clients to accept one of them.

• • Then you spend even more time on emails with “can we change the blocked time or can you invite more people”.

• • Rinse and repeat, giving you very little time for actual work.

If this sounds familiar, read on. This article will explain how Microsoft Bookings addresses all these concerns and more.

As part of my job, I needed to arrange calls with customers and I ended up spending up to 90 minutes per day just managing appointments. In addition to my always busy schedule, that was very inefficient. 

Thanks to a Microsoft Partner, I learned about the new Microsoft Office 365 Bookings and I thought, can’t I use Bookings to help me out with that? I decided to give it a try but I asked myself some questions first as I didn’t want to lose control of my calendar. Let’s look at those questions first.

        1. What are the meeting scenarios I need to cover?

• • • • Regular customer calls, where I speak with customers on project topics with no urgency and where customers can wait for one to two weeks for a call.

1. 1. • • Emergency customer calls, where they’re blocked and need to talk to me to proceed forward with their project.

1. 1. • • Special scoped sessions with a clear guideline, which can be delivered by myself or my team.

1. 1. • • Microsoft Internal Calls with peers.

• • • For these different types of calls, I prefer different days and timeslots. For example, I don’t like regular customer calls on Friday because they involve a lot of process work afterwards. I prefer Friday for emergencies or Microsoft Internal Calls.

         2. How much time for learning and free time do I need to keep?

• • • My schedule during the day is pretty tight with family responsibilities, customer and Microsoft calls, as well as other types of meetings. Learning and work/life balance is important at Microsoft, I need to take some time out of my busy schedule to spend time on learning and recharging. To be honest, I like to spend my Thursday and Friday afternoons on those topics.

        3. When do I want to have different types of meetings and personal time?

1. 1. • Because of family commitments, I can only have calls between 9.30 am and 3 pm. Outside of those times I have to bring or pick up kids from Kindergarten or cannot have a meeting for other reasons. Then there are days where I want to avoid intense customer calls, like on Friday where I’m pretty much exhausted from the week. On Friday I prefer to learn new things, write blogs, sit a Microsoft exam or do internal Microsoft calls.

After this process, I went through the Bookings structure and checked if it can fulfil these requirements. The answer was YES, it can. Let me show you how I managed it.

How did I solve my meeting scenarios?

To cover my different meeting Scenarios, I created four different Booking Calendars, one for each scenario. So, I ended up with the following structure:

• • Regular Customer Meetings

• • Emergency Customer Meetings

• • Microsoft Internal

• • Special Scoped Sessions

That gave me the opportunity to individualize the Time Slots, Staff and Sessions I want to offer. To create Bookings calendars, simply follow the guide here: Get Access to Microsoft Bookings | Microsoft Docs

How I created the meeting times for every scenario and prevented meetings from booking into the wrong timeslots

For the next step, I needed to create the timeslots where I allow the different bookings, I had two options.

Organizational Setup: With the organizational Setup, you configure the meeting hours as business hours as shown in the screenshot below.

Configuring Business hours in Bookings

Personal Setup: Here you set the configuration per Staff Member. That’s the configuration I prefer for my bookings. With personal bookings, there is one very important setting, you need to check the option “Events in Office Calendar Effect Availability”. That setting will prevent Booking from booking into slots where manual appointments were created so you will still be able to block time for private appointments or manually created meetings.

Defining staff settings in Bookings

I made such a personal configuration for my scenarios like in the screenshot below.

Define availability for a staff member

Those settings are enough to make this solution work but I wanted to add some more improvements to make it even better.

Optional: Allow only coworkers to request a call and block search engines from discovering your calendar

There are two options I wanted to enable. First, I do not want the calendars to be searchable via search engines. No one should be able to find the links if I’m not sending them. The second option I wanted to enable was to ensure that Bookings for the Microsoft Internal and the Special Scoped Session calendar could only be made by other Microsoft peers and not by external customers.

To configure these options, you need to change the default Booking Page options for

Booking Page Access Control.

To ensure that only coworkers can book a session, you need to enable Require a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 account from my organization to book. To disable the direct search, you need to enable the Disable direct search engine indexing of the booking page option.

That’s basically all you need to do.

Optional: Add topics to your calls and set time limits for a call

To make it a bit easier to identify topics for a call, I pre-created a few I normally talk about with my customers and coworkers. That helps me to prepare and organize myself. To do so, just create a list of services.

Define topics – services for meetings

I also predefined some options for the session like:

• • Length.

• • Online meeting – which means it will automatically send a Teams invite to the person booking the meeting.

• • In the future, I will add some buffer times too and maybe add some more notes and custom fields.

• • If you scroll down, you can set reminders to be sent to the attendees, which is pretty nice.

If you now book a session, it looks like in the screenshot below.

Bookings interface for the person booking a meeting

I personally really like this structured approach as it helps me stay organized.

Optional: Create a landing page

I ended up with one issue, every Booking Calendar has its own link. That means for my calendar structure I now have four links, but I don’t want to send single links or several

links to a customer. That is why I came up with the idea to create a landing page for Bookings.

I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and as cost-effective as possible. I decided to take two simple static HTML pages hosted on Azure Blob storage, one for Customers and one for Microsoft internal bookings.

To create the static pages, I used the following tutorial. Tutorial: Host a static website on Blob Storage.

Afterwards, I used a link shortener to add a bit of statistics and monitoring and to make the link look a bit nicer. You can use a shortener like bitly or you can also create a CNAME in your own DNS Domain.

In the end, this solution works very well for me.

Conclusion

As you may have noticed, I focused more on the why and not on the how in this article. If you want to learn more about how to set up Bookings, I would suggest you read the documentation below.

Microsoft Bookings | Microsoft Docs

Maybe you’ll find your own way to use it to add value to your daily business or event calendar coordination.

If you have any questions or other ideas on how to use it, please leave a comment.

The post How to Use Microsoft Bookings to Streamline Admin Operations appeared first on Altaro DOJO | Microsoft 365.