#Office365 explained

 

DOES ANY OF THE FOLLOWING SOUND FAMILIAR TO YOU ??…

• I want to get my work documents and pictures on my other devices, so that I can work on them when I’m on the go
• My office programs are always out of date and cannot access the new features
• I want to securely share my files with my colleagues, customer and partners to access and edit at any time we wish
• I need to share my screen with colleagues in meetings and have difficulty organising everyone in one place at the same time
• Can I trust the cloud?

Introducing OFFICE 365…

 

 

What is it?

Office 365 is a platform hosted by Microsoft, providing a collection of products with different licencing models to facilitate different company needs.

What’s Included?

• Exchange Online – Mail, Calendars, Contacts, Tasks
• Office ProPlus – Office applications for desktop, tablets and mobiles to access and edit documents on the move using online Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
• CRM Online – Customer Relationship Management Tool (Sales, Marketing, Service and Social Listening)
• Yammer – Enterprise Social Network (collaboration with colleagues on tasks and documents)
• One Drive for Business – Store, share and sync your files online and offline
• SharePoint Online – Store and sync documents with team collaboration, build websites, intranets and apps
• Project Online – Manage Projects from virtually anywhere on any device and collaborate with team members
• Lync Online – Instant messenger with presence (web conference calls, screen shares, conduct webinars)
• Power BI – Self-service Business Intelligence for all of your data
• Windows Intune – is Microsoft’s cloud-based management solution
• Windows Azure – is Microsoft’s operating system for cloud computing

How we are changing the way we work?

• Devices – 1 billion+ smartphones, 4 years ahead of predictions
• People – 3 generations of workplace demographics
• Cloud – 80% of the Fortune 500 are on the Microsoft Cloud.

Why Office 365?

• Microsoft have 15+ years experience in providing consumer and business services
• Office 365 Home and Personal have a combined 7.1 million subscribers
• Microsoft have invested $15 billion to build its massive cloud infrastructure
• Office 365 and Yammer has been deployed across 100 countries worldwide
• One in four Microsoft enterprise customers has Office 365
• 30k+ engineers involved in cloud-based activities
• Highly secure, compliant infrastructure 
• Office 365 is available in more than 125 markets worldwide.

(Source: Microsoft)

Our Office 365 experts opinion

We asked Phillippa Ritchie from CPS, who has over 8 years of Office 365 consulting experience. What is your favorite feature of Office 365 ? Phillippa explains: 

It’s hard to pick just one feature. I’d say being able to co-author on documents in real time and see the Yammer feed on the side is extremely helpful.

 

How Office 365 solves your business challenges:

 

Office 365 offers a wide array of tools, that can be used to help an organisation and allow their workers access, to key business information from anywhere, at any time, in a secure and managed manner.

 

Our recent webinar discusses the different tools available on Office 365 and the features of each one.

 

Join our next webinar series: Office 365 explained, to see how the different tools tie together, to offer a seamless integrated solution, offering real business benefits or contact our Office 365 experts to learn more or request a live demo here

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 – WHAT’S NEW ? #CRM2015 #MSDynCRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 is scheduled in December 2014. Coming just four months after their spring ’14 release, Microsoft is not wasting any time in adding numerous improvements and new functionality into their Dynamics CRM solution.

There is lots to be excited about when it comes to the new features included in Dynamics CRM 2015. Here’s a quick summary of what to expect:

PLATFORM

Powerful tools provide the ability to fully tailor Microsoft Dynamics CRM to meet your unique business needs. Dynamics CRM 2015 facilitates the delivery of rapid business value with an agile solution framework that can be easily tailored and configured. The following investments in Microsoft’s platform capabilities further the commitment to an open, customisable and extensible product and online service;

• Field Level Security – Improved security
• Improved Search (using wildcard values)
• Business Rules
• Calculated Fields – Reduced developer costs
• Improved Business Process Flows
• Branching Logic & Calculated Fields
• Business Rules Editor Improvements
• Synchronicity with Outlook and Yammer
• Tablet and Mobile enhancements;

SALES

Microsoft deliver the following new features:

• Improved Guided Sales Process – streamlined guided steps allow sales personnel to follow defined methodologies and best practice. Process flow can be branched to reflect a state change. Brand new calculation fields available.
• Product Families – more definable products with the ability to group and bundle products together.
• CRM for Tablets – major performance improvements and enhancements to design and layout of views on tablet devices.
• Sales Hierarchies – new visual hierarchical chart views now in CRM as standard. (See below screenshot of the brand new Sales Hierarchy function)

 

SERVICE – Case Management Enhancements

Dynamics CRM 2015 enables companies to build customer loyalty, empower agents and drive resolutions by providing relevant, proactive and personalised service across all channels. Companies can connect their customers with the right answers to their service inquiries, at the right time, via their channel of choice across web, social, chat, mobile and phone.

DYNAMICS MARKETING

Released in June 2014, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is the brand new element to the Dynamics CRM stack.

The world is changing rapidly and is impacting how companies need to engage with customers. According to recent research, customers are 57% of the way through the buying cycle before they engage.

Marketers are becoming ever increasingly accountable for the ROI of the investment made in marketing, however most lack the ability to track campaigns effectively. Dynamics Marketing enables marketing teams to seamlessly go from planning to execution; leveraging the power of Excel and Power BI to measure the effectiveness of campaigns from beginning to end. Dynamics Marketing 2015 includes:

• Multi-channel marketing
• Email editor – create or edit Emails using the easy drag and drop build process
• Campaign Management Console – split test marketing campaigns with ease
• Integrated Social Listening – brand new integration of Social Listening into the Marketing function
• Marketing Analytics – empower your company with access to sales and marketing data through visual dashboards.
• Internal Process Automation – drag and drop actions
• Geographical Expansion – availability of Dynamics Marketing now available in Japan and Russia
• B2B Marketing – improved lead scoring and brand new webinar integration
• Marketing Resource Management – brand new Marketing calendar with integrated Lync collaboration.

See how integrated webinar creation in the below video can assist in your marketing efforts in Dynamics Marketing 2015.

 

Below is a screenshot of the brand new Marketing calendar, gain unprecedented visibility into your marketing plan and improve collaborative marketing with click to call capabilities from Lync.

SOCIAL – Microsoft Social Listening

Social media is changing the way people communicate. Today’s customers are better informed and are receiving their information from a variety of new emerging sources. Buying decisions are becoming increasingly influenced by discussions online, user communities and buyer reviews. Around 75% of B2B customers are likely to use social media to influence their purchase decisions with customers over 67% of the way through the sales cycle before they make first obvious buying contact.

The majority of the available social listening tools are, however, too complex to use and very expensive. This means the relevant and often critical buying information rarely gets used by the sales and marketing personnel who need it the most. Microsoft believe that this valuable information should be available to everyone, which is why this is now available through Microsoft Social Listening.

Microsoft Social Listening offers:

• Analysis of what people are saying in your industry – through Twitter/Facebook/Blogs and YouTube
• Gain social insights – use location filters to narrow your data set and to see posts from specific countries or regions.
• Extended Geographic availability – Listen to social conversations in 19 languages

See the current version of Microsoft Social Listening for yourself and take a free trial here or click on the picture below.

 

For even more information on what Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 has to offer, download the Release Preview Guide.

Talk to us today to see how Microsoft Dynamics CRM can benefit your business, book a call back, email: solutions@cps.co.uk or call: +44 (0)1628 895600.

Don’t forget to check out and join our upcoming CRM webinars here.

The rise and rise of the app: Where next?

App: ‘a self-contained program or piece of software designed to fulfil a particular purpose’

In the Microsoft PPM world, apps are available to download from Microsoft stores for Project Online/Project Server and the Project desktop client. Apps are also available direct from vendors; the app model can be used by customers themselves to extend functionality in a structured and portable manner.

Apps are available now to comprehensively enhance the project suite of tools and to fill gaps where vendors have identified opportunities. The charging model is varied, with some apps being free; others using a freemium model where more sophisticated functionality is chargeable; and then others being fully chargeable from day one.

At CPS, we have free apps such as our Task Auditor which won 1^st place in the App Awards at the 2013 SharePoint conference for delivering ‘most business value’. We also have a range of chargeable apps and our full packaged PPM solution for Project Online and Project Server: PS+, which incorporates all our current and future apps, as well as a preconfigured solution with full service desk access all of which is provided on a subscription basis.

 

The online and app world:

I admit that I was sceptical as to the UK uptake for Project Online and the usage of apps in a business environment. Having worked with the Microsoft Product development Group in Redmond representing the UK market on future strategy and direction for Project for over ten years, I regard myself normally as having my finger on the pulse of the PPM marketplace…-however this time I have definitely been proved wrong.

This time last year, six months after the launch of Project Online, we were securing our first project online customers and these were a rarity; at the same time we had no apps available. Now 12 months on, 70 percent of all our new customers are online and we are seeing an almost one to one ratio in online customers making use of our PS+ range of apps to enhance and simplify their user experience. This is a massive swing in favour of cloud solutions and now all but the most cloud averse organisations are choosing Project Online over Project Server.

The shift to the cloud world has undeniably led to a widening of the understanding and take up of the app market. As customers move to the cloud, their expectation of the buying and implementation process is changing. Customers want simplicity, ease of installation and solutions to gaps; this is exactly what the app model provides.

 

CPS and our App experience:

For CPS, our early involvement in both the Alpha and Beta programmes for Project Online/2013 allowed us to test the app development model even before the release of the software to the general market. This early exposure, combined with the scale of our customer base and on-boarding of online customers, allowed us to quickly (albeit not immediately!) -recognise the move to the cloud and the requirement for solution providers to enhance the standard solution with apps. This in turn enabled us to move our innovation investment from traditional on-premise developments to innovative app and cloud based solutions.

Having this foresight has resulted in CPS becoming a global leader in app development for Microsoft PPM solutions, leading to Global Awards from Microsoft recognising our excellence for both our apps and our end to end PS+ solution.

 

What Apps have we delivered?

All our Apps are marketed under our PS+ brand (www.projectserverplus.com).

We currently have five apps in the App store, a number in progress and a very sophisticated and unique reporting app which solves the online reporting conundrum for Project Online and Project Server which is only available as part of a PS+ subscription.

Our current apps available through the Office Apps Store are:

 

• Task Auditor – App of the year for the Project Client – allows users to check their tasks against best practice – available free of charge
• Risk to Issue Escalator – Rather than creating a duplicate issue for a risk; easily escalate the risk and mark as escalated.
• Risk Matrix – five by five matrix allows you to report and spot risks for one or more projects in a user-friendly interface
• Work Viewer – detailed day-by-day view of resource utilisation and capacity
• Milestone Gantt – the number one view by demand from our customers – view any number of projects with one bar per project and all key milestones displayed on that bar coloured by status.

We have two further apps due out before Christmas designed to add even more benefit to Project Online:

• Inter-project dependency – easy creation and maintenance of dependencies between projects and programmes. Report easily on dependency exceptions
• Project Assurance – allows the PMO to easily see the status for every project in the portfolio; have key elements of the project been updated and are key items missing

 

 

 

Where is the app market heading:                                                                 

The app market for business solutions such as Microsoft Project is still very immature. Although at CPS we’re seeing a rapid take up of PS+, customers on a larger scale market have not yet widely embraced the model and developers are yet to understand and take full advantage. At the same time, there are limitations in the development model which means that the full richness of apps is yet to come. As the model matures this will become the de facto approach to enhancing base functionality. Whilst the majority of apps are fairly simple and niche with the exception of end-to-end solutions like PS+, the market demand is for more and more sophistication whilst not losing the simplicity of usage and installation. Currently most apps fill small gaps; as the functional capability is enhanced by Microsoft and the demand for apps increases, this will shift to apps that provide richer solutions. I can see a stage soon where Microsoft PPM customers can select from an ever increasing number of business solution apps targeted at specific industries e.g. construction and download a complete rich solution encompassing industry specific processes, templates, configurations and best practice.

 

CPS is currently the only Microsoft Gold PPM partner in the UK to embrace the app model; I’m sure it won’t be long before this changes. But in the meantime, for customers looking to really enhance their PPM capability with Project Online; CPS is the only logical choice and this is being reflected in the rapidly increasing number of new customers that CPS is experiencing.

Today, app users are still the exception but, in 12months’ time, expect them to be the norm.

 

About the Author:

Ivan Lloyd is the Chief Innovation Officer at Corporate Project Solutions (CPS) where he is responsible for all new product development including apps for Project Online/Project Server and Project on the desktop, as well as the award winning PPM solution for Project Online; PS+. He has a background in the design and implementation of PPM solutions dating back to 1993. Since 2002, Ivan has been engaged by Microsoft working with the Product development group in Redmond providing strategic advice and feedback on the UK market as well as by Microsoft UK to provide advice and guidance to key customers.

 

To find out more on PS+ Apps visit: http://www.projectserverplus.com/apps.html or visit the Office App store: https://store.office.com/appshome.aspx

OneDrive delivers unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers.

Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365. Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. We’ve started rolling this out today to Office 365 Home, Personal, and University customers. The roll out will continue over the coming months, so if you want to be one of the very first to get more storage, go here to put yourself at the front of the line. In the meantime, you can take advantage of the massive capacity you have today by activating the auto upload feature for your camera roll on your phone.

Unlimited OneDrive storage and Office from $6.99/month

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For OneDrive for Business customers, unlimited storage will be listed on the Office 365 roadmap in the coming days and we will begin updating the First Release customers in 2015, aligned with our promise to provide ample notification for significant service changes. In the meantime, get started using your 1 TB of storage today by backing up all those work files kicking around on your PC – with the knowledge that even more storage is on its way!

While unlimited storage is another important milestone for OneDrive we believe the true value of cloud storage is only realized when it is tightly integrated with the tools people use to communicate, create, and collaborate, both personally and professionally. That is why unlimited storage is just one small part of our broader promise to deliver a single experience across work and life that helps people store, sync, share, and collaborate on all the files that are important to them, all while meeting the security and compliance needs of even the most stringent organizations.

We’re thrilled to continue our quest of making OneDrive the world’s cloud storage leader – and, always a key part of the best productivity service with Office 365. We’re all in! Stay tuned for more exciting announcements over the coming months.
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Article source: Chris Jones, corporate vice president, OneDrive & SharePoint (https://blog.onedrive.com/office-365-onedrive-unlimited-storage/)

Looking for #project success? Don’t ignore #innovation – David Dunning talks @projchallenge

CPS Chairman, David Dunning is speaking at Project Challenge and explaining why organisations should embrace innovation to develop products and solve business problems.

Innovation: Does it really matter?

Innovation is a process that helps organisations originate new products and ideas. In a constantly changing environment no one can afford to stay still, investment in Innovation is a key differentiator that helps organisations survive, compete and evolve.

In today’s world of fast paced products and services, organisations that don’t take innovation seriously can only expect to become less competitive and less profitable. A greater volume of better ideas, generates more commercial potential and will allow better focus of resource to drive strategy forward.

The barriers to effective innovation

Innovative organisations apply their collective imaginations to drive commercial strategy and to encourage bottom up creativity, but all too often this is not embedded as part of corporate culture.  Some organisations delegate innovation into specific focused groups, or provide nods to innovation with suggestion boxes, but fail to set resources aside to properly consider the ideas yet alone take them forward.

Making space for ideas

In order for innovation to support the business, it must be taken seriously, embraced as a valuable strategy and integrated as part of the culture. Most organisations have a formal vehicle through which they consider strategy. Many use a top down approach to innovation. Some widen the net and create a framework where people can bring their fresh ideas to the table.  Another way to benefit from innovation is to embed culture further down the line, encouraging team leaders and managers, ensuring time is set aside to create ideas and solve problems as a natural part of work behaviour rather than a specific, one off initiative.

Wherever the innovation process is deployed to harness real, uninhibited creativity, it’s important that staff are supported with recognition and visibility for their engagement. Ultimately, letting your organisation know that you take innovation seriously will make your workforce more effective in solving problems, encourage them to do it again, and ultimately enhance your competitive edge.

Is technology the answer?

The answer lies in people, process, organisation and technology. People have ideas all the time, but they need a place to put them, confidence that their input will be reviewed, and the right priority allocated amongst other work and opportunity. To enable this, technology can provide a central hub, a collaborative environment where ideas can be nurtured and benefit from input from other colleagues. Ultimately business management needs support to prioritise – in order to develop the best tangible change projects or product developments. So as always technology alone is not the answer, but it will provide the platform that your processes and your people can utilise to innovate.

How can innovation culture be implemented day-to-day?

Whether top down or bottom up, whether for an organisation or a team, it is vital to identify a champion who will own innovation and move it forward. We help them map out how innovation is currently happening, understand any deficiency that exists, the benefits that might be realised from how they would like it to work. Identifying the gaps between what they are doing and where they want to be enables us to create a sensible, realistic, sustainable approach. We then work with them to define and deploy people, process, organisation and technology to drive innovation.

David will be speaking on accelerating innovation and delivering change at Project Challenge on the 15^thOctober at 10.30am in the Solutions/Software Zone. Make sure you register for free delegate entry to hear his presentation as well as many other seminars and a packed exhibition floor.

For more information about CPS and their services, or to enquire about taking their unique “Innovation Challenge” visit the team at stand 72, or visit www.cps.co.uk.

New version of PS+ is launched at Project Challenge 2014.

CPS will be launching the latest version of their Award Winning, pre-configured Microsoft Project Online and Project Server solution – PS+ – at the Project Challenge Exhibition this October.

Join the CPS team on stand 72 for a live PS+ demonstration and learn how years of best practice advice and lessons learned have helped us develop a unique, low cost toolset that enables organisations to get up and running quickly with a structured project management environment.

This new version of PS+ includes a brand new look and feel, fresh and unique reports, enhanced templates and lots of new, helpful apps.

To learn first-hand, how PS+ could get you up-and-running with a Project Online or Project Server environment in less than 30 days – visit stand 72 at Project Challenge on 14-15 October 2014.

To register free to attend Project Challenge – click here.

Changing the image used in EPTs

A question that arises quite regularly on the Project Server configuration courses, is:

Is it possible to change the icon used for the Enterprise Project Types?

These icons are the ones that appear next to the name of each EPT on the New button in Project Center.

The out of the box EPTs have the following image URL:

The folder that stores these images may be accessed by connecting to the server itself, by remote desktop connection, and then navigating to the following address:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\INC\PWA\IMAGES

This folder contains a number of images, three of which begin with the word “Center”:

It is therefore possible to copy one of these images, rename it and edit the image, using something like Paint.

The new image can then be used for existing and new EPTs.

Filed under: Project Server Tagged: 2010, 2013, CPS, EPT

via Carl Sprake MA(Oxon), ICTP, MCT http://ift.tt/1mNxrCu

After beginning my career in pharmaceutical sales I moved into IT training, initially in the pharmaceutical sector but then moved across to the NHS to teach basic computer skills and the ECDL. I then changed companies and moved into a primarily Microsoft Office training and support role. I joined CPS in 2008 as a training consultant and now provide configuration as well as training services. This article has been cross posted from carlsprake.wordpress.com/ (original article)

Brand new #ProjectServer + YouTube channel!

Brand new #ProjectServer + YouTube channel! Subscribe to see new demos/apps and keep up to date with new releases! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjoFlBvda7lGUWnj0MH5aqg/feed

 

New Project Server + Highlight Reports demo released #ProjectServer #ProjectOnline #Project #PMO

New Project Server + Highlight Reports demo released! Check it out here: http://youtu.be/Jk4pBB3o60Q #ProjectServer #ProjectOnline #Project #PMO

Excel Charts – Trends, targets and highlights

I’ve been reading up on excel charts recently, so I thought I would share a few tips on creating Excel charts. In this post I want to look at three main elements:

• Trends
• Targets
• Highlights

Trends

A large amount of the data that we want to look at is time phased. It is therefore useful to be able to plot the data in ways that make it easy to spot trends over time.

Since we are used to thinking of time as linear, line charts are often the best way of plotting time phased data. For example if we have total work done per day:

Then we can plot this on a chart:

This is a line chart, that shows the full six months worth of data. However, if we apply a filter to the data, by selecting the Data tab and then clicking on the Filter button, we can specify that we only want to view data from, for example, a particular month.

The chart will update to show only the selected data. If your chart continues to show all the data then follow these steps:

1. Select the chart
2. Select the Chart Tools – Design tab
3. In the Data group, click Select Data to display the Select Data Source dialogue box
4. Click the Hidden and Empty cells button to display the Hidden and Empty cells settings dialogue box
5. Ensure the Show data in hidden rows and columns check box is not selected
6. Click OK
7. Click OK

Targets

For a particular set of data we may want to set a target. For example if we look at Resource Utilisation, we may aim for 80% utilisation.

Our initial data and chart may look like this:

If we are using a pivot table as the source then the data may well already be in this nested format. If not then excel is clever enough to plot the chart based on our nested data.

To show the performance against the target of 80% we can add another data series to the chart.

In order to add this additional column to the chart:

1. Select the range E1:E25
2. Do Ctrl+C to copy this data
3. Click on the Chart area to select the chart
4. Do Ctrl+V to paste the data in to the chart

The series can now be formatted as desired.

Highlights

This time we want the chart to automatically pick out the month with the highest, or perhaps lowest, resource utilisation. We can do this by again adding another data series, but this time controlling the value of each data point using a formula.

Essentially the formula says that if the utilisation for the current month is the highest utilisation over the two year period, then show that value, other wise leave it at zero.

When this new series is added to the chart and formatted as a column then only one column is visible:

The lowest point could also be found using a similar formula.

=IF(D2=MIN($D$2:$D$25),D2,0)

This could be combined with the previous data to produce the following:

Filed under: 2013, CPS, Excel, Microsoft Office, Project Server Tagged: Chart, excel

via Carl Sprake MA(Oxon), ICTP, MCT http://carlsprake.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/excel-charts-trends-targets-and-highlights/

After beginning my career in pharmaceutical sales I moved into IT training, initially in the pharmaceutical sector but then moved across to the NHS to teach basic computer skills and the ECDL. I then changed companies and moved into a primarily Microsoft Office training and support role. I joined CPS in 2008 as a training consultant and now provide configuration as well as training services. This article has been cross posted from carlsprake.wordpress.com/ (original article)