Today’s post was written by Dawesh Chand, team leader of infrastructure delivery services at the University of New South Wales.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney is one of Australia’s leading research and teaching institutions. Established in 1949, UNSW has grown into one of the most respected universities in the world—ranked third in Australia and 45th overall by the 2018 QS World University Rankings.

Our dedication to excellence and innovation is something that we model for our students, not just in what we teach but in how we support their learning experiences.

As part of our strategic plan to become “Australia’s global university,” we seek out and test technologies to help us simplify and extend collaboration—not only among students and faculty, but within organizational work groups, between researchers, and with our local and global partners. We’ve already laid the groundwork for scalable collaboration with more than 55,000 seats of Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based services.

It’s not uncommon in university settings to find a mix of standalone solutions and a legacy learning management system (LMS), all of which require separate usernames and passwords, none of which work seamlessly with one another, and some of which are so archaic that they’re simply not utilized. But with Office 365, we have an integrated system of powerful solutions that are familiar and easy to use.

Now we’re looking at Microsoft Teams as a game changer. With Teams, every Office 365 tool is accessible through a single digital hub. One click and you’re in—chat, Office 365 apps, files, and more. All in one place. All seamlessly integrated.

Plus, Teams is customizable and extensible, so it has enormous potential as a pedagogical tool.

Dr. David Kellermann, a lecturer in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, saw a disparity between the learning experiences of students who attended his lectures in person and those who, due to limited seating in the lecture theater, accessed online recordings of his lectures (usually automated slide decks with embedded audio). Kellermann felt that these “web students” were missing out on the full lecture experience—the use of visual aids and nonverbal communication, not to mention the opportunity to raise questions and participate in class discussions.

Kellermann wanted web students to have the uncompromised experience of the lectures, and a framework that his colleagues could easily replicate. When he reached out to us in IT Infrastructure, he’d already cobbled together a makeshift solution through our LMS that greatly improved the web students’ experience—including streaming video, downloadable notes, and a chat room for posting questions and comments—but he felt this system was too complex, not scalable, and lacked seamless integration between tools.

So Kellermann told us what he wanted to accomplish, and we partnered on a classroom pilot. Because we were already familiar with Office 365, it only took us two weeks to create a customized solution in Teams for a group of 370 students—including simplifications that would make future implementations practically effortless. Kellermann’s students could stream video lectures (with closed captions if desired), take and view live-synchronized notes, ask questions from their smartphones or PCs, and access class materials all from within the Teams environment. We could not have achieved the same results with standalone technologies or through our LMS, especially within the timeframe that we were able to execute the pilot.

Beyond improving the communication experience for web students, the fluid, interactive nature of Teams has dramatically enhanced student engagement across the board. “Engagement is one of the most important things in teaching,” says Kellerman. “You have to get your students into it, just like a good movie or a good football match. Using Teams grabs the students’ attention and makes learning part of their everyday lives—inside of the classroom and out.”

Kellermann found an 800 percent increase in discussion posts since moving to Teams. At the conclusion of his course, 100 percent of the students who participated in the student experience survey agreed that they “felt part of the learning community.” And as Kellermann points out, “What was their learning community? Their learning community was Teams.” This increased engagement has also had a measurable impact on student success. Kellermann reported that the exam pass rate for the class using Teams increased from 65 to 85 percent.

In addition, Kellermann’s pilot demonstrates that using Teams can simplify class administration, thanks to its integration with other Office 365 apps. Lecturers can quickly push a meeting, assignment, or exam date out to students from within their own Outlook calendars; lecture notes automatically synchronize in OneNote Class Notebooks; and videos are available through Microsoft Stream. “I can’t express to you how joyful it is to end a lecture and know that I don’t have to spend another hour or more on these tasks,” says Kellermann.

As a technology, Teams is easy—easy to use and, as part of our Office 365 tenant, easy to turn on. In our pilot programs, we’ve seen a very organic adoption process. Kellermann’s students began to use the chat feature within minutes and now they’re sharing their enthusiasm with peers and professors. In 2018, we expect to see a push from the students and faculty for wider adoption, so our next step is to put the necessary support resources in place so we can roll it out across UNSW.

We’re eager to see how UNSW students, faculty, and staff apply Teams and Office 365 to innovate, collaborate, and help fulfill our vision to become Australia’s global university.

—Dawesh Chand

Learn more about Microsoft Teams for Education or download a Quick Start Guide for IT administrators.

The post UNSW pilot program delivers innovative learning experiences, increases student engagement with Microsoft Teams appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
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Last November, we announced Resume Assistant, a new feature in Microsoft Word to help you craft a compelling resume with personalized insights powered by LinkedIn. Today, this new experience begins rolling out to Office 365 consumer and commercial subscribers on Windows.

Writing a compelling resume can be a difficult process, but we’ve heard from customers already using Resume Assistant that the new experience is helping them:

“I absolutely love it; I’ve never seen anything like this!”

“I have been struggling trying to figure out how to brush up my resume and these tips took some of the burden off my shoulders.”

“It’s very helpful to have suggestions on the wording to use.”

With over 80 percent of resumes updated in Word, Resume Assistant helps job seekers showcase accomplishments, be more easily discovered by recruiters, and find their ideal job. Our goal is to empower job seekers with the tools to land their dream job. To learn more about Resume Assistant, head over to the official LinkedIn blog or visit Office Support for tips, tricks, and information on how to get started.

Have you been looking for career coaching or resume service? If you answered yes, a good services like this Career Coaching in Germantown could help! We believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to achieve their career goals and realize their full potential. Whether you’re looking to land your dream job, advance your career, or make a major career transition, our team of experienced career coaches is here to help.

Availability:
Resume Assistant is now available to Office 365 subscribers on Windows whose Word 2016 desktop display language is set to English, who are located in and whose Windows region is set to one of the following region locations: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and United States. The Region location setting can be found in the Control Panel under Clock, Language, and Region. Resume Assistant can be found in the Review tab of Word.

The post Craft a compelling resume with Resume Assistant, powered by LinkedIn—now available appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
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Today’s post was written by Ron Markezich, corporate vice president for Microsoft.

OneDrive makes sharing and file management easier in the cloud, enabling people to securely store, access, and share their files and photos from anywhere, across their devices. Choosing to store your files in OneDrive instead of other cloud storage providers allows you to work faster and smarter with Office 365. It’s the only service that provides real-time co-authoring within Office Online and the Office 2016 apps for mobile, PC, and Mac—as well as personalized search and discovery powered by the Microsoft Graph.

Customers like Accenture, DBS Bank, Textron, and Lowe’s have adopted OneDrive to reduce costs and improve teamwork and mobile productivity, while making it easier to protect and manage company data. Now your organization can switch to OneDrive for free—read on for all the details.

New offer to help you make the switch to OneDrive

We are making it easier for new customers to make the switch by offering free OneDrive for Business for the remaining term of their existing contract with Box, Dropbox, or Google. This offer is valid starting February 6, 2018 through June 30, 2018 for organizations that are not currently OneDrive for Business or Office 365 customers and who make a minimum 500 user commitment.

Customers participating in this offer can leverage Microsoft FastTrack—our customer success service—to make a smooth transition to OneDrive and Office 365. New and existing Office 365 customers can learn more about our on-boarding, user adoption, and migration services at fasttrack.microsoft.com.

“The FastTrack team helped us with best practices, documentation, and a pre-migration checklist. Given the number of people we wanted to migrate, it made sense to collaborate with them as much as we possibly could.”
—Justin Litherland, vice president, IT stores of Lowe’s Companies, Inc.

Learn more about this offer and start your transition to OneDrive.

Customers accelerating their digital transformation with OneDrive

More than 350,000 organizations now have OneDrive, and the growth has been amazing. Just in 2017, OneDrive storage and file sync usage have both tripled. This includes organizations large and small that are using OneDrive to:

• Improve creativity and teamwork, from the corner office to the Firstline Workforce—Accenture uses OneDrive for their 400,000 employees as they travel the globe, accessing over two petabytes of files in the cloud across their devices. Lowe’s recently rolled out OneDrive to 260,000 employees—empowering them to share with colleagues and customers across their 2,200 retail stores.
• Leverage the security, agility, and intelligence of the Microsoft Cloud—DBS Bank made the switch knowing Microsoft invests more in cloud security than a traditional bank could, and Land O’Lakes removed their need for multiple cloud storage providers by moving to OneDrive, giving them a managed solution to better protect their data.
• Manage costs by moving to a single integrated solution with Office 365—Rackspace is saving over $411,000 a year by retiring their previous cloud storage provider in favor of OneDrive, and Textron is making the switch to OneDrive to get the improved governance they desire at a substantially lower cost.

If you want to see more reasons why customers choose OneDrive over Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive, check out our comparison chart.

Groundbreaking OneDrive product innovations

In addition to making it easier to switch, OneDrive is also leading with new innovations. At the Microsoft Ignite conference, we showcased over one hundred OneDrive features and enhancements delivered in the past year and announced new upcoming capabilities. Many of these have rolled out to customers, including:

• Secured external file sharing without the need for a Microsoft account, giving users an easier way to share externally while providing IT departments visibility and control of what’s being shared. Learn more at the OneDrive Tech Community.
• Support for browsing and managing all your files in OneDrive and SharePoint Online team sites without using local disk space with OneDrive Files On-Demand in Windows 10. For more details, read “OneDrive Files On-Demand for the Enterprise.”
• Powerful multi-geo capabilities for OneDrive for Business in Office 365 to support the data residency requirements of multinational organizations.
• Files Restore, a self-service recovery solution for OneDrive for Business files compromised due to accidental deletion, file corruption, or malware infection.
• Making Office and OneDrive the best place to work on iOS with real-time co-authoring on Office documents, drag and drop support, and integration with the Apple Files app. Visit the OneDrive Tech Community to learn more.

Analyst recognition

As we continue to innovate the product and grow our customer base, analysts are taking note. Microsoft was recently recognized as a leader by Forrester Research in their report, The Forrester Wave: Enterprise File Sync and Share Platforms—Cloud Solutions, Q4 2017. In addition to being positioned as a leader, Microsoft was ranked highest in current offering and tied for second in strategy. Microsoft was also recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise File Sync and Share Platforms—Hybrid Solutions, Q4 2017 report. You can read more and get your own copy of the Forrester Research report.

Gartner also recognized Microsoft as a leader in their Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms and the highest of all the leaders in our ability to execute. You can read more and get your own copy of the Gartner report.

As you can see from these customer stories and analyst reviews, OneDrive with Office 365 isn’t just a cloud storage solution. It’s a core ingredient of the modern workplace. I look forward to hearing more about your success as you make the switch to OneDrive and Office 365!

—Ron Markezich

Gartner Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The post Make the switch to OneDrive for improved productivity and cost savings appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
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Today’s post was written by Ron Markezich, corporate vice president for Microsoft.

Since 1998, PayPal has been empowering people and businesses to join and thrive in the global economy. The company’s vision to democratize financial services—providing safe, easy access to transaction services through an open digital payments platform—has created untold opportunities for business everywhere. So when one of Silicon Valley’s flagship companies sees the potential for empowering its own employees with a Microsoft 365 intelligent, highly secure business solution, it’s an exciting endorsement.

PayPal is building workplaces of the future—digital, collaborative, agile, and mobile—to capture the opportunities of the future. From programmers to engineers to marketers, the company is engaging and retaining employees through a comprehensive set of tools that are flexible enough to accommodate different workstyles. And it’s ensuring the same high level of security and reliability to protect the company’s intellectual property.

Bradley Strock, CIO at PayPal, puts it this way:

“PayPal has always put a high premium on recruiting top talent by providing a seamless, productive environment for productivity and collaboration. Today, we’re using Microsoft 365 to support the creative teamwork required to innovate in the digital payments space, helping us bring new products to market more quickly and effectively. Microsoft 365 is a key platform in our digital transformation journey.”

At PayPal, IT is taking a leadership role to ensure that every employee has the tools they need to unleash their potential. It’s going to be exciting watching PayPal reach a new level of creative collaboration and deliver on strategic goals.

—Ron Markezich

The post PayPal defines the future of collaboration with Microsoft 365 and the modern workplace appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
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Teams and individuals depend on Microsoft Planner to get organized quickly, work together effortlessly, and stay on the same page—no matter how large or small the project. Four new features for Planner will give you greater visibility into project schedules, let you group and filter tasks, allow you to receive notifications of upcoming deadlines, and soon you will be able to publish tasks to your Outlook calendar.

Here is an overview of the four new features.

• Schedule view—Meet deadlines, plan ahead, and understand project status with the ability to view your task schedule. In addition, weekly and monthly task views allow drag-and-drop scheduling. Read the support article for more details.

• Group and Filter options—The Group and Filter options in Planner give you deeper insights into your tasks to help you meet key deadlines. For example, filter your tasks by due date to better understand approaching deadlines. Or use the Group feature to view tasks that have not been started, so you can prioritize your work.

• Due date notifications—Receive an email notification summarizing tasks due in the coming week—and stay on top of your approaching deliverables.

• iCalendar format feed (coming soon)—Make better scheduling and time-management decisions by publishing tasks to your calendar. By adding your tasks to your Outlook calendar, you’ll never lose track of current and upcoming tasks—helping you meet your deliverables.

These features have been among the top requests on the Planner UserVoice forum. Schedule view, Group and Filter, and Due date notifications are now available to all Office 365 subscribers. Outlook calendar integration via the iCalendar format feed is rolling out soon. We look forward to your comments and feedback. Feel free to submit feedback through the Planner UserVoice forum. Visit Planner now!

New to Planner?

There’s never been a better time to start using Planner! With these new capabilities, Planner is a complete solution for task and work management. Planner is part of the Office 365 productivity suite and is fully integrated with the other Office 365 applications. And if you’re already using Microsoft Teams, you can host a Planner Plan inside your Teams workspace, so everybody can collaborate in one place. You can also link a Planner Plan to a task in Microsoft Project Online, so your team can track tasks and work details in Planner even when that work is part of a larger Project plan being tracked in Project Online. Visit Planner to learn more.

—The Planner team

The post Conquer time with new features in Microsoft Planner appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
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As part of our ongoing commitment to help our enterprise customers with their deployment and maintenance of Office 365 ProPlus and Windows 10, today I join my colleague Bernardo Caldas in sharing news about servicing and support changes. You can read more about the details on our TechNet blog.

—Jared Spataro

The post Office and Windows servicing and support updates appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
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Today’s post was written by Ron Markezich, corporate vice president for Microsoft.

Disruption in the payment industry is all about simplification, expedience, and secure global connections. Mastercard is leading the charge to a “world beyond cash,” creating products and services such as the company’s new digital wallet, Masterpass, and tokenization solutions that improve the security of digital payments. These advances continue the company’s long history of innovation, rooted firmly in its culture and people. That’s why it’s so exciting that Mastercard uses Microsoft 365 to incentivize and engage its employees through highly secure, modern workplaces—where creative collaboration happens as quickly and seamlessly as any Mastercard payment.

Here’s what Ed McLaughlin, president of Mastercard Operations and Technology, has to say about the company’s adoption of Microsoft Cloud solutions:

“Mastercard connects people, financial institutions, merchants, and businesses across the globe. As one of the largest technology companies in the payments space, we give our employees the tools they need to deliver continual innovation to our customers and do it securely. We selected Microsoft 365 to support a modern workplace for our 11,900 employees, giving them the capability to collaborate on the fly and deliver their best work.”

I like to think of how we are amplifying the ingenuity and creative thinking that goes on every day at Mastercard through continuous improvements to the Office 365 platform. For example, we are weaving Microsoft machine learning and AI capabilities throughout Office 365 apps. One new feature, Insights in Excel, automatically highlights patterns, outliers, and trends in data, so employees see different perspectives on their business information to spark new ideas.

I’m looking forward to seeing the next iteration of Mastercard’s take on disruption in the global payment ecosystem!

—Ron Markezich

The post Mastercard disrupts payment industry with innovation driven by Microsoft 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Source: Office Blog
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