Sunday, December 25, 2016

Communication & Marketing with Planner - Office 365 Groups Scenarios (2/4)

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Ever since Office 365 Groups was released in preview the discussion “when to use what” has been going on between Office 365 Groups and Team Sites. I’ve been opinionated in the debate myself, but instead of listing pro’s and con’s I presented four scenarios at Ignite in Atlanta where Office 365 Groups shows great promise of solving work related problems.

You can get the slides and watch the recording of my session BRK2277 - Learn about Office 365 Groups and how to use them, at the Microsoft Tech Community site. The video is also featured on Microsoft’s support article: Learn about Office 365 groups.

Communication & Marketing

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This scenario is about marketing activities and is highly driven my tasks in Planner. Different tasks related to for example news articles, recruiting campaigns, and updating the public web sites are all added to Planner as a place to know what’s in the pipe. Events related to marketing efforts and various important deadlines are added to the Groups calendar. Files related to marketing collateral are stored in SharePoint, and notes on vendors and venues are stored in OneNote. We also receive Puzzlepart relevant tweets and news into the Groups mailbox using the Groups connectors.

Previously we had tasks in Jira, files in Dropbox, and no shared view of monitored news. Moving this to an Office 365 Groups has made a lot of sense in order to get a unified view of marketing and communications efforts.

Other planner based scenarios following the same lifecycle:

  • Development tasks in a kanban style manner
  • Todo lists for a larger group of people

Thursday, December 15, 2016

The Calendar - Office 365 Groups Scenarios (1/4)

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Ever since Office 365 Groups was released in preview the discussion “when to use what” has been going on between Office 365 Groups and Team Sites. I’ve been opinionated in the debate myself, but instead of listing pro’s and con’s I presented four scenarios at Ignite in Atlanta where Office 365 Groups shows great promise of solving work related problems.

You can get the slides and watch the recording of my session BRK2277 - Learn about Office 365 Groups and how to use them, at the Microsoft Tech Community site. The video is also featured on Microsoft’s support article: Learn about Office 365 groups.

The Calendar

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This scenario is focused around events in time, typically recurring events. The event at a point in time is in focus, and you use Office 365 Groups to support the event. The Group Calendar handles the scheduling of the event, conversations before and after the event can take place using the Group mailbox, and notes during the event are stored in the Groups OneNote. If you want to chat during the event, you could opt-in to use Microsoft Teams.

In my Ignite demo I showed Puzzlepart’s internal recurring event Puzzle Friday, where we every other month go over financial status, give an overview of customer cases, have topic discussions and I present “The Svenson Files”, an aggregate of what has happened in the Office 365 space since last meeting.

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As you can see, we use OneNote both for the agenda and all notes taken during the event. We also add follow-up tasks in the OneNote itself. Supporting presentations are stored in the Groups document library, one folder per event occurrence. Then linked into the OneNote. The beauty of this is that we can have one pc hooked up to the projector, which always have all content needed easily available. No switching to my pc for some presentation – it’s all available :) For live demo’s we often create web casts up front, stored in Office Video.
Other calendar scenarios following the same lifecycle:
  • Board meetings
  • Any department/division regular meeting
  • Sprint planning / reviews
If you wanted to improve on the scenario you could build OneNote templates to cover all pages needed per event occurrence.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Tip for writing multiple XRANK’s or nested XRANK’s

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My colleague Tarjei had a requirement to list items in a particular order on a page. The items were tagged with different phases and he wanted items to be listed in this order:

  • Concept
  • Planning
  • Doing
  • Finishing
  • Realization
  • No phase

The easiest approach I have found doing these types of custom ordering is using XRANK with bulk interval boosts to ensure the order. Pick an interval which suits you. If you need multiple levels of sorting add secondary sorts with intervals less than the major range.

One level sorting:

  • Concept cb=100
  • Planning cb=90
  • Doing cb=80
  • Finishing cb=70
  • Realization cb=60
  • No phase cb=50

Two level sorting:

  • Concept cb=1000
  • Planning cb=900
  • Doing cb=800
  • Finishing cb=700
  • Realization cb=600
  • No phase cb=500
  • Word cb=50
  • Excel cb=40
  • PDF cb=30

Once you have the logic in place you need to write a nested XRANK statement. This often gets confusing with getting parenthesis correct. A Pro tip is to use Freshness Boost Generator in the SharePoint Search Query Tool as a starting point, and then replace your matching and boost expressions as needed. Say you need 6 sorting intervals. Set the constant and max boost values to 0, and add 6 day intervals as seen in the image below. Copy the resulting expression and change the write>{} parts and XRANK(cb=) parts as needed – with all parenthesis intact at the right places.

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