Records management solutions – such as Objective and Meridio – have earned their place in IT leaders’ software arsenals, providing valuable functionality to businesses and ensuring compliance to the letter with industry regulations, key standards and legislation.
However, with the volume of compliance requirements increasing, businesses tightening their belts, and traditional records management platforms getting long in the tooth, many organisations are now investigating alternative methods of modernising their records management capability.
The good news is that there is now an alternative to those legacy platforms. The even better news is that, if your organisation uses Microsoft 365 enterprise licences, you’re likely already equipped with the tools you need, ready to be configured.
Here’s another chance to see our webinar from 2021 on taking Microsoft Teams beyond just meetings and chat.
Using ‘Teams as a platform’ means enabling features throughout Teams that will help you and your colleagues to get more done. Our expert will show you how to extend the Teams platform by using App Templates, and demo how you can integrate Power Platform features using Dataverse for Teams.
Watch the full session recording below and don’t forget to check out our upcoming webinars for more Microsoft 365 insights throughout the year.
Here’s a chance to see our popular webinar from 2021 on Microsoft Power Automate. Discover how AI can take the tedium out of repetitive business tasks, freeing your team up to deliver higher-value work and get more done.
In this expert-led webinar, we introduce Microsoft Power Platform’s robotic process automation functionality. Live demos show you how easy it is to automate tasks with Power Automate and AI Builder.
Watch the full session recording below and don’t forget to check out our upcoming webinars for more Microsoft 365 insight throughout the year.
Microsoft Loop is a collaboration app which lets users create interactive pages in real-time. Loop pages can contain items such as lists, tables or notes, or more complex components such as Dynamics 365 data.
Microsoft has announced a new product, Microsoft Loop, which will allow users to create highly-interactive pages in a collaborative way.
Loop will be the first significant use of the hotly-anticipated Fluid Framework, which treats data in Office 365 apps as ‘live’. That means data remains linked to its original source when copied into Loop.
It is now a simple truth that the Microsoft 365 platform is mature, secure, stable, and here to stay. While it is clearly desirable to move away from the costs and constraints of on-premises infrastructure, the journey to Microsoft 365 is one that can be tricky to navigate by yourself. Whether your organisation is making …
One of the challenges of working from home with Microsoft Teams is that it’s much harder to gauge how those in a meeting feel about what someone is saying. In person, we intuitively pick up on what people are thinking about what’s being said, based on their body language. On a screen during a video call, it’s not quite as easy 😭.
A new feature, being introduced over the next month, aims to restore the ability to show how you feel about what’s being said, without interrupting the speaker. Borrowing somewhat from social networks like Facebook, Microsoft are adding emoji-based ‘reactions’ to the video meeting experience.
It’s a common problem – you’re happily using Teams, when you get distracted by some activity, or a colleague messages you. You switch to another area of Teams to address the task at hand. Moments later, though, you want to go back to what you were originally working on… but where did it go?
Never fear. Much like the back button in popular browsers, Teams is now gaining a ‘History’ menu, which will let you retrace your footsteps through Microsoft Teams.
Retrace your steps in Teams
Thanks to the new History menu, it will be a piece of cake to navigate to previous locations. By simply hovering over the ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons at the top of the Teams window, you will be able to see all the tabs, conversations, teams and files you recently looked at.
Two new types of usage report – for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Search – are being rolled out to Microsoft 365 in February 2021. Here’s what you need to know.
Microsoft Teams usage report
Admins will be able to find a new Microsoft Teams usage activity report in the usage reports section of the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre.
The report gathers together data from across your organisation’s use of Microsoft Teams, and reveals useful information both at an overall (tenant) level, and on a team-by-team level. This gives you a ‘big picture’ view of how your organisation is making use of Teams.
The Teams Usage Activity Report started rolling out in January, and everyone should have it by early February 2021.
Microsoft 365 Groups may not be as recognised a name as Microsoft Teams, but it is a key component how Teams operates.
The massive increase in Microsoft Teams usage because of organisations rapidly transitioning to remote working has meant that both Administrators and the Microsoft 365 platform have had to react to ensure operations run smoothly.
The Microsoft 365 Groups Roadmap highlights the future plans and features which are being released. This article aims to highlight the items which we think are worth your attention.
What are Microsoft 365 Groups?
Microsoft 365 Groups is the membership service for more than 22 collaboration apps and workloads within Microsoft 365. The most visible of these for users is typically Microsoft Teams, but it also includes Yammer, Stream and Planner.
Microsoft 365 Groups
Microsoft 365 Groups were previously called Office 365 Groups. This relabelling aligns the service with the wider ‘Microsoft 365’ branding across the platform. There is no change to the capabilities and the terms are basically interchangeable.
A Microsoft 365 Group does have a few similarities (but many differences) to a traditional Active Directory or Azure AD Security Group, which will be familiar to system admins. Although Azure AD underpins the group identity management, the relationship with the collaboration workloads is a new capability and needs to be understood to prevent issues for users and administrators.
Productivity Score is a new feature of Microsoft 365 designed to let administrators monitor how productive your organisation is, and the extent to which staff are adopting the platform’s features.
It also lets you benchmark your organisation against others of a similar size. The idea is that you can take action where there has been limited take-up – ideally by taking steps to encourage user adoption, or alternatively by making a positive choice to disable a feature or tool.
Productivity Score is accessed via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. It provides immediate information on how your organisation is using Microosft 365 via metrics including Communication, Meetings, Content Collaboration, Teamwork and Mobility. This data is gathered from across all your users from the last 30 days, and benchmarked against live data from peer businesses of a similar size.
Microsoft 365 Productivity Score
It also provides a small number of metrics relating to the technology side, such as internet connectivity, and whether users have the latest updates installed. This helps admins ensure users are getting the best possible technology experience.
Each of the eight categories is given a score out of 100, which also provides you an overall organisational score out of 800. Admins can use this data about how Microsoft 365 is being used to make better-informed decisions.
Privacy concerns quelled
Initially, Microsoft 365 Productivity Score included statistics for individual named users throughout your organisation. You could even download a spreadsheet showing precisely how much each individual, named user had used each Microsoft 365 feature in the last 28 days.
