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Scott Cameron
Friday, 14 October 2016 / Published in Uncategorized

4 Shocking Microsoft Products You Need to Know About

Whoah! Microsoft did What?

You’ve been using Microsoft’s products for a while now – Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype.  You know how to use them, what they do.  Here are a few you probably haven’t used.  Some are really interesting and different than what you normally expect from Microsoft.  Some are actually free!
Here are 4 Strange Microsoft Products You Need to Know About:

Sway

Are you bored with PowerPoint?  Need to create a quick and easy visual presentation on the web?  Log in with your Microsoft Account at Sway.com and you can create a visually stunning presentation quickly and easily.

Choose a template then develop your story line with text, pictures and rich media easily – video, audio, Tweets and more.  Invite someone to co-create your Sway or review it if you like, then when you’re done if you don’t like it, hit the Remix button to give it a new look.

When you’re done hit the Share button to share it on Facebook or Twitter or upload it to your public gallery on Docs.com.

Sway is free with a Microsoft account. You can also get free Outlook.com mail and free OneDrive storage with that same account. Go to live.com to get an account, but most people have one already.

Flow

Have you ever missed an e-mail from your boss?  Are you tired of posting updates twice – once to Twitter and once to Facebook?  Maybe you’d like to automatically save your e-mail attachments to SharePoint.  You can do all this and more with Microsoft Flow.

Flow has dozens of pre-created automations already built that you can use, or create your own from a selection of “triggers”, conditions, and actions.

For instance, you can create a Flow like this:
Receive e-mail from Bob > Create a Wunderlist task > Add the subject from Bob’s e-mail as the Title for a new Wunderlist task.

If you’re a geek like I am and have played with home automation, Flow is a lot like IFTTT (If This then That) but for business.  It’s a cool concept and it will be interesting to see what people come up with.

Flow is another free service from Microsoft and just requires an account. Sign up at live.com.
BONUS: Check out Wunderlist – its a great (and free!) to-do and personal planning app for the web and most mobile devices. Wunderlist is a part of Microsoft as well! Thank you Satya!

Delve

For those business users already on Office 365 with files in OneDrive and SharePoint, Delve provides a way to share and discover documents, subject matter experts, groups, and more… all based on your own preferences, content and existing contacts and groups.

Delve lets you “favorite” boards and documents to enable easy recall of content you discover. The feature is quite similar to what you see in Pinterest.

For instance, if you share a lot of documents with your marketing team and they publish a new design style guide or PowerPoint template to the public, you can go to Delve and quickly see the new doc without having to go search for it on SharePoint.

Delve also allows you to:

  • Post and share an internal blog
  • View your organization’s structure – see the reporting structure for your internal contacts
  • Offer public praise to your coworkers
  • Discover various documents you have security to view for contacts, groups, and contacts of contacts
  • Dive in to MyAnalytics (with an additional license) – get details about how you use your time, who you should stay in touch with, set goals for how to manage your day and more.

Access Delve from within your Office 365 portal at portal.office.com. You can open it from the “Waffle” menu in the upper-left-corner if you have access. Requires an appropriate Office 365 subscription.

Planner

Need to get organized but think Microsoft Project is overkill? If you have Office 365, Planner goes hand-in-hand with Office 365 groups to allow for easy team collaboration on tasks with light project management tracking and metrics.

If you’re familiar with kanban boards and cards, Planner is very similar. You Create a task or card on one of several boards. The boards organize the cards either in to categories or as a reflection of process or backlog for items to do.

You can use Planner to assign tasks to team members and then easily track status of all tasks in the Chart view. Planner is closely tied to Office 365 Groups and you can manage a Notebook, store files, share a Calendar and even use the Conversations view to discuss progress of your project. Office 365 Groups could (and probably will!) be an entire blog of its own. There’s lots to like there.

Like Delve, Planner requires an Office 365 subscription and appropriate access to be granted.

Keep an Eye on Office 365 and Microsoft for More

Microsoft has moved to a cloud-first model. You see innovative applications like these popping up regularly now. There will likely never be a full on-premises Office client for any of these applications but they are all built to work well on mobile devices, may be integrated in to other Microsoft apps and may show up in the mobile app stores as well.

The cloud allows Microsoft to quickly develop and market test applications and those that catch on will stick around while others may fall off. You can be sure of one thing, though… you’ll see more of these and some may look strange if your only experience with Microsoft is Office.

(This article is cross posted from my LinkedIn Pulse blog)

MicrosoftMicrosoft OfficeMicrosoft Office 365Microsoft PowerPointMicrosoft SharePoint
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Scott Cameron
Monday, 02 March 2015 / Published in Archived Articles

The Future of Productivity and HoloLens

If you’re a gadget geek and are interested in virtual reality, Microsoft recently announced something you should check out… HoloLens (pictured above on Reddit).

There’s lots of talk about whether these are really holograms (they’re not) and about whether the Oculus Rift (a virtual reality or VR headset) is the future or HoloLens is.  I think there’s room for both… they’re different… the Rift is about total immersion in an alternate reality (think gaming).  HoloLens is about augmenting our own (productivity).  Of course there’s going to be crossover between the two and they may merge at some point – there’s no reason why HoloLens couldn’t do VR and VR headsets do augmented reality as well.

I started watching Continuum over the weekend on Netflix and I was struck by Kiera’s cybernetic HUD (read down in the Technology section) – when you miniaturize the HoloLens down to the size of contact lenses (give us 10-15 years…) we’ll be able to do something very similar.

Here’s Microsoft’s official video about the HoloLens….

 
And interestingly, here’s Microsoft’s latest Office Productivity Future Vision video – notice the HUD – it looks a lot like HoloLens and like Kiera’s cybernetic HUD doesn’t it?
 
 
Of course there are pieces of many other initiatives at Microsoft in there as well:
  • Work from anywhere – on any device
  • Cloud computing
  • Mobility
What do you see in the video?  When do you think we’ll see some of these technologies go mainstream?  Sound out in the comments.  Enjoy!
Augmented reality; HoloLensGoogleMicrosoftOculus RiftVirtual reality
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About Scott Cameron

Scott Cameron Headshot

I’m an information technology geek & leader. I’m a cloud evangelist, practice manager, solution architect & mentor; a speaker, writer, and project/product manager. I am a Microsoft Azure Solution Architect with experience innovating, selling and managing the delivery of services at multiple Fortune 500 companies.

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