One of the questions that my customers and partners often ask me is “how does Microsoft use Office 365 internally?” Over the course of my next few posts, I am going to discuss topics related to how my team uses Office 365 capabilities and how it impacts our daily work.

One of the Office 365 capabilities that my team heavily leverages is Office Delve. In this post I will focus on the following topics:

• My role at Microsoft
• Information discovery and content reuse
• Delve capabilities
• Changing culture and behaviors
• Resources to learn more about Delve

Note: While the scenarios I describe are real, the screenshots that I have included are from my test/demo environment. This is done to protect confidential information that is private to Microsoft.

My Role at Microsoft

My role at Microsoft is as an Office 365 architect. It is a technical pre-sales role where I work with the top 100+ enterprise customers that are based out of the Northeast in the United States. There are more than 100 people that I work with inside of Microsoft on a regular basis. These vary from people that are part of a customer’s core sales account team to people in Microsoft support or services to people that are in the product engineering and marketing teams.

Information Discovery and Content Reuse

In an organization as large and geographically distributed as Microsoft, it can be challenging to find and reuse content such as presentations, prior project work, and other document types. For example, content that may be valuable to me could be stored across various SharePoint team sites and on OneDrive for Business sites.

In my team (the Northeast District) we have SharePoint Online collaboration sites setup for each of our 100+ customers. These sites are grouped together in what we refer to as our district portal. The purpose of these portal sites is to enable account teams to post and share customer specific presentations, proposals, and meeting notes in a central place. We also have specialist teams (such as the Business Productivity group that I am on) who have their own SharePoint Online team sites on the portal for centrally posting reusable content and sharing best practices. Of course, each individual also has their own personal OneDrive for Business site where they can store and share content that they may be working on that is not specific to a customer or even our district – for example, presentations that I may be delivering at a conference such as Microsoft Ignite or a local Office 365 user group meeting.

Before Delve, I needed to either know what site to go to when looking for content or I could go to the Microsoft enterprise search page and search, filter, and refine my queries to narrow down on content that may be of interest to me. The key here is that I had to actively go out and search and look for the content that I thought would be most relevant to my task.

With Delve, I very rarely need to search for content and I am now “finding” more relevant content and discovering content that I would not have searched for on my own.

Delve Capabilities

There are a few key capabilities within Delve that help me to be more productive and discover content.

My Delve Home page shows me the most relevant content to me based on a number of “signals” that are collected by the Office Graph, which is the machine learning engine that is working behind the scenes to power the Delve experience. The Office Graph understands who I work with (based on organizational structure and collaboration activities) as well as the content that has been viewed most often and modified most recently by the people that I work with most. The key thing to note is that Delve honors and respects existing privacy and security settings within SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Organizations and individuals can opt not to use Delve and, similar to enterprise search throughout Office 365, people only see items in their Delve feed that they are authorized to view.

Drilling into the My work link helps me to see the most recent content that I have created or edited across Office 365. This view also shows me recent updates from others that are working with me on these documents. This is extremely helpful to someone like me who regularly works with multiple customers and account teams in a single day.

Shared with me shows me the documents that others have explicitly, you guessed it, shared with me from SharePoint Online team sites or their individual OneDrive for Business site. This is very helpful for seeing the most recent documents that others have shared with you without having to remember which site the document was stored on or search through your email to find the notification that was sent when a document was shared with you.

Drilling into a person, in this case Tony, gives you a view of documents trending around a person. It could be documents that they created or modified recently or items that their colleagues have been working on. Again, in this scenario, Delve is only showing you content that you are authorized to view. The Delve people view on the left side of the page dynamically changes based on the people that you are collaborating with most recently. I use this view often to keep up on what my colleagues and managers are working on and to discover new content from relevant people that they work with as well.

One of the great new features that has recently been added to Delve is the concept of Boards. Boards provide content consumers with the ability to easily tag content in Delve and “pin” it to a Board that can be shared with others who can also pin items to the Board. One example, is discovering content related to a customer, for example Contoso. Individuals can choose to follow a Board which makes it available within Delve to quickly jump to whenever needed. The consumer analogy that I like to relate this feature to is the popular site Pinterest where people are able to pin and share articles, images, and a variety of content with their family and friends. Delve now brings a similar set of capabilities to the enterprise.

Since Delve is based on the Office Graph, and Microsoft’s enterprise search platform, of course Delve also has a great search experience. Delve’s search experience helps you to filter what is displayed to you in Delve across all of the people, sites, and boards that are relevant to you. This is great if you are trying to narrow in on something specific.

Once you find content in Delve, you can then view and, if your permissions allow, edit the Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF documents directly in your web browser.

Changing Culture and Behaviors

The implementation of Delve at Microsoft has really helped myself and others on my team to be more productive and has increased our overall adoption of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

People on my team are now posting and sharing more to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online since Delve makes it much easier for people to find the content they have shared and also to discover new content without having to go search and look for it. People are getting value out of sharing their content – both as content creators and consumers.

I now find myself viewing Delve at least once per day. Delve regularly surfaces information for me that I would not have otherwise looked for on my own. Delve has prevented me from “reinventing the wheel” on a few occasions and to learn from the work being done by others across my team.

My team has also started to leverage Boards within Delve to socially organize and aggregate content across the organization. A good example of this is a Board that we have recently created to link together some key documents related to a customer project and a Board for planning work that is being done for our team in 2015.

Resources to Learn More about Delve

Want to learn more about Delve? Check out the following:

1. The Delve launch announcement provides a nice summary of what Delve offers currently and what Microsoft’s vision is for this technology. The post also includes a video about the Office Graph, which is the machine learning engine that is used to power the Delve experience.
2. This video offers a quick high level overview of what Delve is.
3. This blog post summarizes the Delve Boards feature announcement and includes a video showing Boards in action.
4. Hungry for more technical information? Check out the SharePoint Conference session recording which provides a deep dive on Delve (formerly known as Codename Oslo) and the Office Graph.
5. Join the discussion about Delve in the Office 365 Network on Yammer.

Office 365 ProPlus is a hot topic that I often discuss with my large enterprise customers. This post will summarize responses to some of the frequently asked questions that I receive. Here are the questions that I will be answering:

• Why should my company use/purchase Office 365 ProPlus?
• How do I deploy Office 365 ProPlus?
• How can I manage updates to Office 365 ProPlus?
• How is Office 365 ProPlus license activation handled?
• How do I gain insights into my organization’s usage of add-ins, macros, and other Office applications?
• What is the new Office application model and store?
• How do I train my end users?
• How do IT professionals get training?

You can also read how TE Connectivity and Henkel each rapidly deployed Office 365 ProPlus to 40,000 users.

Do you have other Office 365 ProPlus questions or topics that you would like to discuss? Mention me in your post here in the Office 365 ProPlus group in the Office 365 Yammer network.

Why should my company use/purchase Office 365 ProPlus?

There are many reasons why my enterprise customers choose to purchase Office 365 ProPlus. These include:

• Each licensed user can use Office 365 ProPlus on up to 5 PC or Mac devices.
• Office 365 ProPlus can be installed and used side by side with older versions of Office, such as Office 2010, 2007, or 2003.
• Each licensed user can also use Office on 5 Windows tablets or iPads and 5 phones. Office for Android tablets is currently available in preview as well.
• With Microsoft’s “cloud first, mobile first” strategy, Office 365 ProPlus customers get updates and new releases before other customers. 2 recent examples include the Outlook 2015 for Mac release and the Office 2013 updates to support multi factor authentication.
• Office Online enables users to view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files via a web browser for files stored inside of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
• Each licensed Office 365 ProPlus user receives 1 TB of OneDrive for Business cloud storage for storing, syncing, sharing, and accessing their files anywhere and from any device. This will be upgraded to unlimited storage in 2015.

How do I deploy Office 365 ProPlus?

Many customers have existing processes in place for deploying Office. While Office 365 ProPlus provides some new deployment options, customers can continue to deploy Office using similar tools and techniques that they are familiar with. In summary, customers have a few options for deploying Office 365 ProPlus. They include:

• Include Office 365 ProPlus as part of a desktop image.
• Deploy Office 365 ProPlus to a user’s device using management tools such as System Center.
• Enable users to install Office 365 ProPlus from an on premises network installation point.
• Allow users to install Office 365 ProPlus directly from the Office 365 portal.

This article on TechNet provides an excellent summary of the various deployment options. The Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus: Expanding Your Deployment Skills session from TechEd is a great overview and series of demonstrations that should help you with getting started.

Want to exclude certain applications (e.g. InfoPath) from your Office 365 ProPlus package? Check out this article for the details on how to achieve this.

How can I manage updates to Office 365 ProPlus?

Depending on which deployment method you choose for deploying Office 365 ProPlus you have some options for choosing how Office updates are made.

For users that installed Office 365 ProPlus directly from the Office 365 portal, Microsoft will handle the Office updates automatically.

For customers that choose to manage the Office 365 ProPlus deployment on their own, they can choose whether users get their updates directly from Microsoft via Office 365 or if the customer wants to control when the Office updates get pushed to their managed devices, which is common in cases where the customers want/need to thoroughly test and manage the Office updates on their devices (e.g. workstations in a hospital and other highly regulated environments).

This article provides a summary of the Office update options that are available.

How is Office 365 ProPlus license activation handled?

One of the biggest changes with Office 365 ProPlus is how users are licensed and activated for using Office. Since Office can now be used on up to 15 devices per user, Microsoft manages the user’s Office entitlements and device activation – regardless of how Office gets installed and updated on the device.

This TechNet article provides a great summary of how activation occurs with Office 365 ProPlus. In summary, each user must have a valid Office 365 user account and Office 365 ProPlus license assigned to them. All Office activations are done against Office 365 and a successful connection to the service must be completed at least once every 30 days – otherwise Office will enter “reduced functionality” mode.

Do you have shared workstations (e.g. kiosks in a manufacturing location) or users that currently access Office via Remote Desktop Services (RDS)? Make sure you check out this article which provides information on how to handle Office 365 ProPlus activation in these scenarios.

How do I gain insights into my organization’s usage of add-ins, macros, and other Office applications?

Customers often have users that are leveraging 3rd party add-ins, macros, and other forms of Office customizations. While Office 365 ProPlus was designed to be backwards compatible with prior versions of Office and Office file formats, and Office 365 ProPlus can be installed side-by-side with prior versions of Office, many customers still want to have visibility into their usage of Office which helps them with planning for upgrading to a new version of Office and supporting users during and after the upgrade.

Office 365 ProPlus introduced many new telemetry tools that assist with this process. The great news is that these Office telemetry tools are available at no additional cost and are built into Office 2013. The Office telemetry tools can also be deployed and used with Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010.

What is the new Office application model and store?

While Office 365 ProPlus still supports the previous Office automation and integration capabilities, such as macros, VBA, and COM add-ins, a new application model has been introduced. One of the goals of this new application model is to support modern applications that will work across platforms, including in the browser based versions of Office Online. More information on how to build these new applications can be found here on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). This article provides a nice overview of the various types of apps for Office that are available.

There is a public Office application store where you can try and buy applications that have been built with the new Office application model. Your organization can also have a private app catalog where you can manage and distribute Office apps to your end users.

How do I train my end users?

Office 365 ProPlus has a similar user experience and file formats as Office 2007 and 2010. Users should already be familiar with these Office capabilities from their business and personal experience with the prior versions of Office.

There are also a number of Office training resources available such as:

• Office training, videos, and tutorials from Microsoft provide a great foundation for getting started with Office.
• Microsoft has created a number of Office 2013 quick start guides which are helpful – especially for new users being transitioned to Office 365 ProPlus.
• Partners such as BrainStorm and New Horizons offer training solutions geared towards helping end users get the most value out of Office 365 ProPlus.

How do IT professionals get training?

There are a ton of resources for helping IT professionals get started with deploying and managing Office 365 ProPlus. These include:

• Getting started guide for deploying Office 365 ProPlus is a great launching point for all things related to managing and deploying Office 365 ProPlus.
• Microsoft Virtual Academy provides free IT training on Office 365 ProPlus.
• Office 365 Summit provides additional technical training and resources related to Office 365 ProPlus.
• The Office 365 Garage Series provides regular news and resources to help you stay up to date on what’s new with Office 365 ProPlus – and other parts of Office 365.
• Office 411 has a nice set of links to additional resources, blogs, and videos related to Office 365.
• Join us here in the Office 365 ProPlus group in the Office 365 Yammer network to ask and answer questions with your peers as well as with Microsoft employees and our partners.

(Updated on December 17, 2014 to add information on Identity and Authentication)

One of the topics that I regularly discuss with my large global enterprise customers, based in the United States, is Office 365 security and compliance. There are many aspects to this conversation especially with my customers that are in highly regulated industries, including financial services and healthcare, and geographically distributed, most with employees based in the European Union.

Below are some of the key resources that I usually provide as follow-up items after our discussions. Hope these help.

Want to discuss further? Mention me in your post in the Security and Compliance group in the Office 365 Technical Network on Yammer.

General Information

1. The Office 365 Trust Center should be your 1st stop for getting and staying up to date on the latest Office 365 security, privacy, and compliance related capabilities.
2. Microsoft’s Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Standard Response to Security Questions document goes deep into the various controls that Microsoft has in place for the operation and management of Office 365.
3. Office 365 is regularly independently audited and certified against many industry standards including ISO 27001, EU model clauses, HIPAA BAA, and FISMA. More details can be found here.
4. The Global Foundation Services site provides a virtual tour and deep information on how Microsoft manages the data centers that host Office 365 and other Microsoft enterprise cloud offerings such as Azure, Intune, and CRM Online.
5. Multiple presentations on Office 365 security were recorded at the TechEd Conference in May and are freely available on Channel 9. Two of my favorites are Microsoft Office 365 Security, Privacy, and Compliance Overview and Microsoft Office 365 Security, Privacy, and Compliance Deep-Dive
6. The Overview of Compliance in SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Office 365 session from the SharePoint Conference in March provides a great overview of the current state and roadmap.
7. Speaking of roadmap, the Office 365 roadmap site provides information on many related recent updates and capabilities under development.
8. There were also many Office 365 DLP, MDM, Compliance, and Security announcements from TechEd Europe in October.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

1. Beginning with Exchange Online, Microsoft continues to make investments in DLP in Office 365. This Office 365 DLP overview presentation and  blog post are a great place to start.
2. Here is a deeper technical dive on Exchange Online DLP features.
3. SharePoint Online (including OneDrive for Business) has started to introduce DLP. A nice overview of what is currently available is here. The Use DLP in SharePoint Online and Assign eDiscovery permissions to OneDrive for Business sites articles provide the details on how to configure and begin using these new DLP features.
4. There were also many DLP announcements from TechEd Europe that cover the roadmap for DLP in Office 365.

eDiscovery

1. Office 365 provides eDiscovery capabilities that span Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, and OneDrive for Business. Customers can also leverage a hybrid architecture to perform eDiscovery against on premises file shares. More information on eDiscovery in Office 365 can be found here.
2. Microsoft’s legal team presented at the SharePoint Conference in March showing How Microsoft legal uses Office 365 eDiscovery
3. Another great SharePoint Conference session to review is this End-to-end Microsoft eDiscovery in Office and Office 365 session.

Mobile Device Management (MDM)

1. One of the big announcements from TechEd Europe in October was that built in MDM capabilities are being added to Office 365 soon. Get all of the details here in this blog post.
2. These MDM capabilities being built into Office 365 are powered by Microsoft Intune, Microsoft’s device and app management solution for phones, tablets, and PCs.  Organizations that need protection beyond what’s included in Office 365 can subscribe to Intune and get additional device and app management capabilities.

Rights Management Services (RMS) & Encryption

1. Microsoft’s RMS offering has evolved significantly over the past year and now supports encryption and decryption of non Microsoft files on non Microsoft devices. This blog post provides a great overview of what has been shipped in the new RMS offering and what Microsoft’s vision and strategy are here. The New RMS overview and Microsoft IRM overview sessions also provide additional information and demonstrations.
2. Office 365 Message Encryption has also been released to support sending and receiving secure, encrypted messages between organizations.
3. The Encryption in Office 365 session provides a great overview of encryption capabilities across Office 365 offerings.

Identity & Authentication

1. Customers often have questions around how to create and manage user accounts in Office 365. Since I work with large enterprise customers, my customers typically leverage Office 365 Directory Synchronization and Federated Identities. More information on the various options available can be found here on TechNet. The Introduction to Microsoft Office 365 Identity Management and Microsoft Office 365 Directory Synchronization and Federation Options session recordings cover these topics in more depth.
2. Microsoft recently released a new version of the Azure Active Directory Synchronization Services (AAD Sync) tool. This new tool addresses many common customer requests such as limiting the number of user attributes that get synchronized from a company's on premises AD environment to Azure AD and supporting the syncing from multiple AD forests.
3. The IdFix tool is very helpful with preparing for Directory Synchronization.
4. Many of my customers are using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to limit access to Office 365 services based on the location of the client using client access policies.
5. Some of my customers using ADFS also want to use an alternate ID for their users to use to log into Office 365 - instead of having to change their User Principal Name (UPN) field in Active Directory. This article summarizes how to accomplish this.
6. This is a great checklist to help with setting up ADFS for Office 365.
7. Customers can also choose to leverage third-party identity providers to implement single sign-on with Office 365. You will want to make sure that your provider is supported as part of the Works with Office 365 Identity program.
8. Many customers leverage the built in Multi-Factor Authentication capabilities with Office 365.
9. Office 2013 is also being updated to support Multi-Factor Authentication and SAML identity providers.
10. Customers often want to automate the Office 365 license assignment process. PowerShell can be used to script this.

Over the past few years, I have had many discussions with Microsoft customers and partners about the best way to get started with Office 365. This blog post will cover 2 main areas that we often discuss together:

• Key use cases and scenarios for getting started
• Resources to help you on your journey

Key Use Cases and Scenarios for Getting Started

Historically many customers have begun their Office 365 journey with Exchange Online. While Exchange remains a key part of Office 365, many customers are looking for additional solutions that offer quick “time to value” and business benefits.

Here are 5 of the top scenarios that many of my customers have been leveraging within Office 365:

1. Office 365 ProPlus enables you to leverage Office on up to 15 devices per user including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices. You are also able to leverage Office Online to create, view, and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files in Office 365 using your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari). 
2. OneDrive for Business provides each user with 1TB of cloud storage. In addition to a great cross platform browser experience, native OneDrive for Business clients/apps have been released for Windows, iOS, and Android devices with a Mac client under development.
3. SharePoint Online includes OneDrive for Business and also offers capabilities to provide Extranet, Team, and Project Sites to your employees, customers, and partners which can be setup quickly and securely and then accessed anywhere and from any device.
4. Yammer is Microsoft’s enterprise social networking platform which many customers are leveraging internally and externally to “work like a network”.
5. Lync Online provides instant messaging, presence, video/desktop/application sharing, and web conferencing.

Resources to Help You on Your Journey

1. The Office 365 Fast Track site has recently been updated to include resources to help you get started with Office 365 and continue to drive sustained adoption.
2. The Office 365 Success Center provides resources to help with planning for a successful rollout.
3. The Office 365 Learning Center links to various end user training materials.
4. The Office 365 Service Descriptions provide all of the technical details of what you can and cannot do in Office 365 with links to articles to help you get up and running quickly.
5. Looking for technical training? The Microsoft Virtual Academy is your single source for great technical training for Office 365 administrators.
6. Want to get connected to other Office 365 customers, partners, and Microsoft employees? Join the more than 20,000 people that are already on the Office 365 Technical Network on Yammer.
7. The Office 365 technology blog is THE blog for staying up to date on Office 365 news and announcements.
8. Check out the Office 365 public roadmap site to see what has been recently released and what features/services are currently under development.

The Boston Office 365 user group is launching on Thursday, May 22, 2014 from 6-8 PM at the Microsoft New England R&D (NERD) Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA.

I have the privilege of presenting the first session, which will be an overview of Office 365. You can read more about my session and register to attend here.

There are a variety of ways for you to connect with our user group. These include:

• Boston Office 365 User Group Website
• Boston Office 365 LinkedIn Group
• Follow the Boston Office 365 User Group on Twitter
• Join the Boston Office 365 User Group Yammer Network

If you are looking for more information about Office 365, the following sites may be helpful:

• Office 365 for Enterprises Information
• Office 365 Service Descriptions
• Office 365 Fast Track
• Office 365 Technology Blog
• Office 365 Trust Center
• Join the Office 365 IT Pro Network on Yammer

I am looking forward to seeing everyone at our first meeting in 2 weeks!

The Best of SharePoint Conference will be returning to the Microsoft office in Cambridge, MA on Wednesday, March 26, 2014.

More details will be shared soon on the call for sponsors and speaker selection process.

Please join our Microsoft Northeast SharePoint Community Yammer network to keep up to date: https://www.yammer.com/microsoftnortheastsharepointcommunity

Many customers and partners have been asking about starting an Office 365 user group and/or having some sort of Office 365 Saturday events (similar to SharePoint Saturday) here in the Northeast. We would cover various Office 365 related topics and include Exchange, SharePoint, Yammer, Lync, and Office related sessions.

Please let me know if you're interested in working together on and/or joining this.

The goal would be to do something in the Boston area to start after the New Year.

Thanks!

March 22, 2014 Update

The Boston Office 365 user group will be launched in May. The first meeting will be on Thursday evening, May 22 at the Microsoft New England Research & Development building in Cambridge, MA. Please sign up for our mailing list. We will also be providing more details about this at our Best of SharePoint Conference event this week and at SharePoint Saturday Boston in April.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

http://www.bostono365usergroup.com/

Yesterday I had the opportunity to present again at SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire. My topic this year was on how to take SharePoint to the cloud.

During this session we covered the following topics:

• Key differences between SharePoint Online and SharePoint on premises
• Office 365 architectural concepts
• How to prepare for and migrate to SharePoint Online
• How to handle hybrid scenarios
• Yammer’s role
• Microsoft’s roadmap for future updates to SharePoint Online, Yammer, and Office 365

The slides that I presented have been posted here on SkyDrive.

It has been 1 year since we launched the Microsoft Northeast SharePoint Community on Yammer. This is a private Yammer network that has been established with these primary goals:

• Provide a forum for Microsoft SharePoint customers and partners (based primarily in the Northeast region of the United States) to connect with each other and Microsoft employees. This forum is being used to ask/answer questions and share best practices.
• Enable local SharePoint user group and SharePoint Saturday organizers and members to connect with others in the community.
• Offer the Microsoft team the ability to share information on product releases, news, and local events.
• Demonstrate how Yammer can be used to support collaboration. This is important for the SharePoint community to understand as Yammer becomes more tightly integrated into SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and Office 365. Check out the latest roadmap post and Yammer customer case studies for more information.

To help keep the discussion focused (and prevent everyone from getting spammed by advertisers, recruiters, etc. ) we have kept the network private and grant access by invitation only. If you’d like to join us, feel free to submit an access request via the Microsoft Northeast SharePoint Community on Yammer

Scott Jamison, Sue Hanley, and I are very excited that our “Essential SharePoint 2013” book is now available and we will be having a special book signing event tomorrow (Tuesday, August 13, 2013) evening at SPTechCon Boston.

This edition of the book is packed with nearly 800 pages of SharePoint 2013 guidance with a significant amount of breadth and depth on key topics including:

• Planning Your Solution Strategy
• Introducing the SharePoint 2013 Platform
• Planning for Business Governance
• Planning for Operational Governance
• Planning Your Information Architecture
• Planning Your Adoption Strategy
• Developing a Value Measurement Strategy
• Understanding Architecture Fundamentals
• Planning Your Upgrade
• Taking SharePoint to the Cloud
• Planning Security
• Managing Enterprise Content
• Managing Web Content
• Planning for Social Computing
• Planning Enterprise Search
• Planning Business Solutions
• Planning for Business Intelligence
• Planning for Mobility
• Integrating Office Applications
• Content You Can Reuse

We are also honored to have forewords written by Jeff Teper and Jared Spataro from the Microsoft SharePoint product engineering and management teams.

We look forward to your feedback on the book!

I am happy to announce that I have recently accepted a new position within Microsoft. I will still be working with enterprise customers and partners based here in the Northeast but my focus will be shifting to Office 365.

So, why am I making this move now? Here are the top 5 reasons:

1. On March 4, 2010, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made the public statement that Microsoft was “all in” with the cloud and stated that Microsoft was betting the future of its company on cloud computing. In October 2012, Ballmer redefined Microsoft as a “devices and services” company in his annual shareholder letter. It is clear that cloud computing, including services such as Office 365 and Azure, is viewed as strategic by Microsoft.
2. Microsoft is not the only company that is embracing cloud computing. Studies, such as those cited in this recent USA Today article, reinforce this trend and the positive impact not only for cloud service providers such as Microsoft, but also for our customers and partners.
3. This Wednesday, February 27, 2013, Microsoft will be launching the 3rd major service update for Office 365. This update will bring the 2013 versions of Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Visio, and Project to Office 365. More information on these service updates can be found in the service description updates.
4. As part of the New SharePoint announcements, and reinforced at the SharePoint Conference in 2012, Microsoft has made it clear that future product updates will be released to the cloud first and Microsoft will be providing service releases on a much more frequent basis – including additional social investments with Yammer, SharePoint, and Office 365.
5. I have thoroughly enjoyed the past 5 years working at Microsoft and focusing on SharePoint and Office. This new role offers me the unique opportunity to leverage my existing skills, knowledge, and relationships while gaining new experiences working more deeply with Exchange, Lync, Yammer, Project, Visio, and our Microsoft cloud services including Office 365 and Azure.

By no means am I leaving the SharePoint community behind. I plan to continue to be very active and speaking at events including SharePoint Saturday Boston and the Boston Area SharePoint User Group in April.

I also plan to resume blogging more again … as soon as we finish writing and publishing “Essential SharePoint 2013” later this year.

Are you exploring new and different ways to use SharePoint to get business results?

SHARE is the only SharePoint event truly designed by and for BUSINESS users. It will explore all facets of real-world SharePoint, and you will benefit by learning from hundreds of SharePoint projects that can help you avoid common industry challenges.

Microsoft in conjunction with The Eventful Group is sponsoring a free webinar series that will give you a sneak peek at what you can expect from this year’s SHARE Conference with presentations from SHARE speakers, thought-leaders, and experts.

Monday, February 25, 2013, 2 pm EST

How to Support a Growing SharePoint Community and Build a Culture of Collaboration and Innovation – REGISTER NOW

Carolyn Brehm, Manager, Learning & Collaboration, Bristol-Myers Squibb

Matthew Spewak, Manager, Learning & Collaboration, Bristol-Myers Squibb

Our SharePoint Collaboration Team uses a dual model of support for SharePoint: A) resource supported site development and B) self-supported site development. As adoption of both types of sites has grown, so has the demand for enhanced capabilities and training to support them. Our team has evolved beyond driving adoption of SharePoint to supporting a culture of collaboration and empowering site owners and end-users to utilize SharePoint to support business processes and innovation.

Monday, March 18, 2013, 2 pm EST

Forms, Workflows & Dashboards – Oh My! – REGISTER NOW
Jennifer A. Mason, MVP SharePoint Server, Rackspace

In this webinar, Jennifer Mason, a Microsoft MVP with Rackspace Hosting, will teach you how to create fully automated, highly customized and professional-looking business forms and full-blown business processes using SharePoint, InfoPath, and SharePoint Designer tools.

Microsoft Office InfoPath is a powerful form-creation tool that lets you design forms without writing any code. When you use this product in conjunction with SharePoint and SharePoint Designer, you have all the tools you need to build no-code automated business solutions.

Jennifer has over eight years of SharePoint experience and is a frequent blogger, speaker, author, and SharePoint community contributor. Her primary focus is helping organizations get the most value from SharePoint by building solutions using out-of-the-box tools, to bring immediate ROI to the organization.

Over the past few weeks Microsoft has put out a ton of information related to SharePoint 2013. Jeff Teper recently blogged about the new SharePoint 2013 customer preview milestone and the SharePoint team blogs regular updates.

Hopefully you’ve also been able to review the various IT Pro and Developer resources available and have signed up for a SharePoint Online (Office 365 Enterprise) trial and/or setup a local SharePoint 2013 environment. Vesa Juvonen has also done a great job summarizing all of the free SharePoint 2013 training resources Microsoft has made available to help you get started.

Personally, I’ve been working with Scott Jamison and Sue Hanley on the “Essential SharePoint 2013” book and have been spending most of my “free time” (also known as nights and weekends!) working on that project - and helping my wife chase around our 4 kids!

Here is a quick summary of 5 of my favorite things about SharePoint 2013 (so far …):

1. Social – Microsoft made significant investments in social computing in SharePoint 2013. Key highlights include micro blogging (with interactive newsfeeds for @ mentioning people, replying, tagging posts, liking, etc.); social search improvements; the ability to mark posts and replies for follow-up; mobile support; and modern community sites that include features such as badges, moderation and reputation scores. In addition to the great work done in SharePoint 2013, Microsoft also recently acquired Yammer, a leader in enterprise social computing.

2. Search – With this release, Microsoft has fully integrated the SharePoint and FAST search engines into a single search platform. This search platform not only powers SharePoint 2013 but Exchange 2013 search as well. Search has become core to many of the key SharePoint use case scenarios – more than just document search – but also being used to drive recommendations; social; analytics; and web content reuse.

3. Web Content Management – There are significant updates in web content management. Some of the highlights include “channels” for targeting content at different browsers and platforms; native support for HTML5 and CSSv3; the ability to use the design tool of your choice (no longer just SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio); the new content by search web part (for aggregating content across sites); metadata driven navigation; and automated language translation services.

4. SharePoint Online – SharePoint Online has come a long way in this version – its 3rd major service update/release. There is now near feature parity between SharePoint Online and on premises including richer support for business intelligence. There are also new related services built on top of SharePoint Online including Project Online and tighter integration with Windows Azure (e.g. Access Services).

5. New store and application model – SharePoint 2013 adds a new application store and development model. This article on MSDN does a great job summarizing these new capabilities.

I’ll continue to post periodically to this blog and my Twitter feed. I also look forward to seeing many of you at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas in November 2012.

During my 4+ years working at Microsoft I have had the privilege to work with many of the largest SharePoint enterprise customers based in the Northeast. One of the consistent topics that we end up discussing is SharePoint content types. One of the interesting observations is that so many customers have not yet realized the full power of content types and how they can help enforce consistent policies, templates and metadata while also helping end users to realize the business value of using SharePoint and further driving adoption. I have also been discussing how content types can help with governance by applying retention policies consistently.

Here are a few key concepts that my customers and I often end up discussing:

1. Metadata and attributes – Making sure that documents of the same type (e.g. sales proposals) have the same attributes (e.g. customer name, deal size) associated with them. 2 additional techniques that I also see people leveraging is reusable site columns and the managed metadata service to drive broader consistency and reuse of these attributes.
2. Core (base) content types and inheritance – The concept that, just like with object oriented development design patterns, you can implement content types that build upon each other to make the management of content types easier and reusable. For example, if every document within your company has the same attributes (e.g. confidentiality level) then you would create your own company base content types that other content types would then inherit and be derived from.
3. Retention and audit policies – Information management policies can be enabled to have different rules for how long you retain content and what events get audited (e.g. viewing or editing items). For example, you could apply a retention policy for any sales proposals created to only keep all versions of the document for the first year after the document is created and to only keep the most recent published version after 3 years.
4. Templates – You can specify that whenever some clicks the “new” menu item within a document library that the content type is displayed and automatically creates a new instance of a document based on a specific document template. This is very helpful for ensuring consistency of documents such as sales proposals and others where the goal is to have a consistent format, look and feel.
5. Workflow – Reusable workflow associations enable you to have a consistent process applied to content types. One example was a customer that wanted to have blogs reviewed before they were posted. To accomplish this they created a reusable approval workflow and associated it with the base blog item content type.
6. Document sets – Document sets are a special content type that lets you work with a group of related documents. In our sales proposal example, perhaps whenever a new document set is created for a sales proposal the correct Word document, PowerPoint presentation and Excel spreadsheet can be automatically created. Then the document set can be routed via workflow for approval as a single unit as opposed to individual documents.
7. Search and filtering – There are many ways that attributes and content types can be used to find content. One of the ways that customers often leverage this is using the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) to get a filtered rolled up list of items based on a specific content type within a given site collection.
8. Office integration and document information panel – You can specify that the document information panel always be shown by default in Office clients for certain content types. This helps to provide easy access to view and modify required and optional document attributes.
9. Replication across site collections and farms – One of the challenges prior to SharePoint 2010 was having enterprise content types that could be leveraged across multiple SharePoint site collections or farms. The content type hub (as part of the managed metadata service) allows you to replicate content types across site collections and farms- with a few caveats that need to be considered, such as if you have a workflow associated to the content type.
10. Content organizer – The content organizer feature within SharePoint 2010 is helpful for routing documents to specific folders or libraries from a central “drop off” library where content organizer rules can look at the content types and metadata and route documents appropriately.

Here are some of the key resources that I often point customers to as they get started with leveraging content types:

1. Content type and workflow planning - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262735.aspx
2. Identify users and analyze document usage - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261954.aspx
3. Content type planning worksheet - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165878&clcid=0x409

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See you in Vegas

As we wind down 2011, I wanted to take some time to reflect back on an amazing year and share my top 5 observations and thoughts from the past year:

1. We have an AMAZING SharePoint community around the world and locally in the Northeast. During the past year alone we launched new SharePoint user groups and SharePoint Saturdays in Connecticut and New Hampshire. We also continued to build upon the momentum established in 2010 around the SharePoint communities in Massachusetts and upstate New York. As you may know, these events are largely community led and sponsored by our Microsoft customers and partners. Many people give up their evenings and weekends to share lessons learned and best practices for leveraging SharePoint. I am honored to be a member of such a great team!

2. Social computing and innovation management continue to be hot topics of discussion with many of my customers and partners. It is more than just building “Facebook for the enterprise” – it is about driving and sustaining long term changes within our businesses; changing the culture; and how we work and collaborate together. This is an area that I expect to see continued growth and focus on moving into 2012.

3. Office 365 and SharePoint Online are generating significant interest and adoption across customers of all sizes and industries since the 2010 versions were launched in June. This recent interview with Tom Rizzo goes into much more detail on some of the trends we are seeing.

4. As SharePoint turned 10 years old in 2011, there continues to be significant focus and discussion on topics around SharePoint maturity, governance and adoption strategies. Many customers and partners are also looking at SharePoint as an applications platform and for advanced scenarios including enterprise search; Extranets; and public facing websites.

5. It is great to see so many people focusing more on engaging the SharePoint end user community. From the end user focused track at the 2011 SharePoint Conference to the new www.iusesharepoint.com resource site to the great End User SharePoint community site, people are looking for new ways to help the business creatively solve challenges using SharePoint. 2012 will be another great year with many end user focused conferences being held around the world.

In closing, I want to thank all of my customers, partners and colleagues at Microsoft for an amazing 2011. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Chris Bortlik

One of the topics that I’ve been discussing often with my customers and partners is innovation management and ideation solutions. This is a hot topic and companies are trying to find new ways to make money, save money, improve processes and increase collaboration with their employees, customers and partners.

These solutions help solve business problems around:

1. Employee/customer/partner engagement & retention
2. Generating and surfacing new ideas from “the crowd” (aka crowdsourcing)
3. Finding the next blockbuster product
4. Improving existing business processes
5. Getting constructive feedback
6. Killer application – driving adoption of collaboration solutions

Some of my recent presentations on driving end user adoption for SharePoint and taking SharePoint to the next level have demonstrated how innovation management solutions fit into the broader Microsoft SharePoint and Project Server landscape. The Microsoft Innovation Management enterprise solutions center provides some great background information and resources for this space. Craig Rode from the Microsoft Manufacturing industry team has some great resources published on innovation solutions available for purchase.

I’ve been looking at innovation management solutions for about 6 months now. In May 2011, my colleague, Chad Gronbach, and I began working with Joe Boggio and 2 partners, Pcubed and DataLan to deliver 2 innovation focused events at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Waltham, MA Those events were so well received by our customers that we have been working to expand the offerings and focus on innovation within the Northeast District.

Chad and I have recently been teaming up with Simon Floyd and additional Microsoft partners. Customers often ask me what the various options are and the discussion usually comes down to one of build vs. buy. Below are the options that I’ve worked most extensively with and encourage you to check out.

Build

1. The innovation portion of the demonstration that Chad and I built for the MTC event in May was literally built in 1 day using out of the box SharePoint and Project Server capabilities including InfoPath forms, workflows and discussion lists. We constructed an InfoPath forms list for submitting corporate “challenges” that then notified people via a workflow to submit and review“responses” during a period of time that the challenge was active for. We also had an “innovation idea exchange” (SharePoint discussion board) where people could submit ideas and give feedback to others. We leveraged the SharePoint rating functionality for getting feedback and sorting on the top ideas. We also used the SharePoint managed metadata service to allow for consistent categorization of topics. Below is a screenshot of the rollup views that we presented on the innovation site home page. If you are new to SharePoint 2010, then I encourage you to review my prior post on making the business case for social computing on SharePoint 2010.

2. At the SharePoint Conference in October, Simon Floyd presented a session on “Managing Innovation with SharePoint & Project Server 2010”. During this session Simon demonstrated a free innovation solution accelerator that Microsoft is providing “as is” to Microsoft customers and partners to get their solution off the ground with a set of prebuilt SharePoint site templates and webparts – as well as the ability to “promote” an approved idea to a formal project in Project Server. A screenshot of the solution is below. 2014 Update: This solution is now supported, managed, and offered directly by our partner, QuantumPM.

3. Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) has some innovation focused solution areas and accelerators that can be purchased which significantly shorten the time to develop and deploy them while offering for a high amount of customization and flexibility.

Buy

1. Capgemini and Spigit have teamed up to offer innovation business, consulting and software solutions based on SharePoint and Project Server.
2. Pcubed and PTC are also offering innovation business, consulting and software solutions based on SharePoint and Project Server.
3. SharePoint social computing partners like NewsGator and Neudesic are also solutions that many of my customers evaluate in this space. Their solutions are built on top of the SharePoint platform.

This past Saturday, we had our 1st SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire. Over 150 people attended this event and there were more than 35 sessions delivered. It was an amazing event and we are grateful for all of our event sponsors that made this event possible and free of charge for attendees. Edgewater led the organization of this event flawlessly.

I was fortunate to be a speaker in 2 sessions: the “Stump the SharePoint Pros” panel discussion and “Upgrading to SharePoint 2010: Why and How to Get It Done”

As requested, my slides have been posted on SkyDrive where they can be viewed or downloaded.

Keep an eye on this post on my blog for information on upcoming SharePoint Saturday and user group events in the Northeast. See many of you at the SharePoint Conference next week.

SharePoint Server 2010 Business Intelligence Training

View the course: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/hh126809

Learn how you can lay a deep foundation for your SharePoint Server 2010 Business Intelligence (BI) skills in this training course. This course teaches how to use SharePoint Server 2010 as your BI platform and covers the following topics: Business Intelligence Overview, Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, Visio Services, Reporting Services Integration with SharePoint 2010, and PowerPivot for SharePoint Server 2010. The content is cross referenced with available Advanced IT Pro training (Ignite) per module.

SharePoint Server 2010 Business Composites Training

View the course: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/hh126810

Learn how you can lay a deep foundation for your SharePoint Server 2010 Business Composites skills in this training course. This course covers a SharePoint Server 2010 Composites overview and all of these aspects for SharePoint Server 2010: Access Services, InfoPath Forms Services, Workflows in SharePoint 2010, Business Connectivity Services, and SharePoint BI and Composites Service Application Configuration.

First, I’d like to start by apologizing for not posting to this blog recently. My wife and I had twin girls about 6 weeks ago and I have been out of the office thanks to Microsoft’s VERY generous Infant Care Leave (ICL) policy that allowed me to stay home and help the family get settled in. I’ve also been trying to focus this blog on unique content with a goal of posting at least 2 times per month. I have recently been investing more time in using my Twitter account to share quick updates, links to resources and news.

Now to the matter at hand …

Earlier this week I spent some time setting up a brand new Office 365 tenant from scratch. I wanted to experience the process first-hand and see what my customers go through. To do this, I created a free 30-day trial account which not only includes SharePoint Online, but also Office 2010 Professional Plus, the Office Web Applications, Exchange Online and Lync Online.

As someone who has setup new SharePoint environments, I was extremely impressed with how quickly my new SharePoint 2010 Online tenant was made available on Office 365. It literally took less than 15 minutes for the environment to be self provisioned and available for me to use. I didn’t have to worry about setting up Windows Servers then the SQL Server then installing and configuring SharePoint 2010. I didn’t have to worry about capacity planning or setting up backups and planning for disaster recovery. I didn’t have to set up a DMZ or VPN connection to make the site securely available outside of my firewall.

Once the setup wizard completes, you get a very clear, concise, action oriented page to help you get started and even build your own pilot or deployment plan. You can also add and invite up to 25 users to participate in the environment during the trial period.

From there I was able to import some users; create my new SharePoint site collection; and setup some demo sites provided to Microsoft employees by the SharePoint team out in Redmond. These sites definitely don’t look like the vanilla SharePoint team sites and also show the power of being able to customize the look of your online My Sites:

I even have SharePoint Enterprise features like Access Services available to me:

So, while SharePoint Online may not currently have full feature parity with SharePoint on premise, I hope you can see that it is significantly enhanced over the prior version of the Business Productivity Online Services. If you are currently starting a new SharePoint 2010 project, I would encourage you to check out Office 365 and see if it meets your needs.

Getting your users excited and ready for SharePoint 2010 doesn’t have to be challenging! Visit www.iusesharepoint.com to help you get started.

Content for Users:

• 10 Humorous Webisodes
• 10 Corresponding How-To Videos
• 45 Quick Reference Cards
• 25 Tips and Tricks
• Real User Stories

Content to Drive Adoption:

• Option A-Lunch & Learn SharePoint Adoption Kit: This kit contains all the materials you need to promote SharePoint within your organization. The kit includes instructions, templates, videos, quick reference cards and more to help you deploy an internal SharePoint resource site - a place to access SharePoint information and tools, and connect around the best part of the day: lunch. Download this kit to show your team how SharePoint makes life, and lunch, a little better.
• Option B-Build an Adoption Kit that's right for you: If your organization already has an established learning center, you can download individual pieces to post to and promote the destination that works best for you. These standalone pieces can be used to add interesting and helpful training content to your organization's site and to drive SharePoint learning and adoption. Choose to download one or more of these resources, like webisodes, Show Me How videos, quick reference cards, poster templates, table tents and more.

Thanks again to everyone that attended, organized and sponsored the 1st SharePoint User Group in New Hampshire on Wednesday night. It was an amazing turnout – far exceeding my expectations.

As requested, below are the slides that I used in my presentation. They are posted on SkyDrive.

Looking forward to seeing people again at future SharePoint user group meetings and the 1st SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire in September.

I’ve just posted the slides that I presented at the SharePoint Connections Boston event this week. These include the slides that I presented on Monday morning during the SharePoint 2010 Development Bootcamp with Bob German and the Migrating SharePoint 2007 Solutions to SharePoint 2010 breakout session that I presented yesterday afternoon.

The links and resources that I referenced during these talks are included in the slide decks and others are on my Twitter feed.

This promises to be a great event – Bring Innovation into Focus – Executive Workshop with Microsoft & Pcubed

This limited seating Executive event will take place on Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 in Waltham, MA and is targeted at large enterprise customers– primarily those with more than 1,000 employees. We look forward to hosting you!

Register today by sending an email to rsvpmsft@microsoft.com

I’ll be presenting at the SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast tour in Boston April 25-27. Get your team up to speed for developing, deploying and administering SharePoint 2010 sites and get on the path to success. Enter "SP100" and get $100 off registration!

BONUS: The first 100 people to register per city can attend the SharePoint 2010 Development Bootcamp for FREE! Register now to secure your seat!

Solve today's challenges
Get questions answered by Microsoft SharePoint team & industry experts.

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Take away practical guidance and best practices for deploying, configuring, managing, and developing for SharePoint 2010.

Prepare for tomorrow
Learn how to align SharePoint with your organization's strategic objectives.

Master the technology
Dive deep into SharePoint technologies and features in over two dozen sessions taught with an independent, real-world perspective.

Check the website for the full list of sessions and speakers.
Register at DevConnections.com/SPTour or 800.438.6720