Category: Office 365

Make your Office templates available to all users

Most companies and organizations have a good ambition that everyone should use the company’s standardized Office templates. The templates must follow the correct graphic profile and have the correct outline. Unfortunately, few companies and organizations succeed in this.

Wrong file types

A common misunderstanding is that an Office template is a “Reusable Office file” with the file extension .docx .xlsx or .pptx that you copy and change. Nothing could be more wrong.

“Real” Office templates have the following file extensions:

  • Word = .dotx
  • Excel = .xltx
  • PowerPoint = .potx

Stored in the wrong place

Sometimes the templates are on a file server, hopefully, the templates are at least stored somewhere on the company’s Microsoft 365 tenant (sometimes in a document library in SharePoint, sometimes they are even in a Team or spread across several Teams and channels.)

Sometimes you might even have your Office templates stored in an external solution that users have to log into and download the templates from. This often means that you miss when a new version has arrived and you continue, blissfully unaware, to work with your locally stored downloaded outdated templates.

Wrong Access rights

An interesting detail is that when you store these “Reusable Office files” (that are not valid template formats), in an area where most users have editor rights, it is guaranteed that sooner or later someone has been inside and changed one or more of these files.

A good way to avoid these problems is to create “real” Office templates and store them in an area where only a few people have editor rights while all employees have read rights.

But is there an easy way to make these templates available to all users directly from Word, Excel and PowerPoint? The answer is a resounding YES! Keep reading to find out how.

Continue reading “Make your Office templates available to all users”

Migration is easy (when you know how to do it)

Most things are easy once you master them. Migration is no exception.

Wednesday, October 19, it’s time again for MVP-dagen in Oslo and it is a great pleasure for me to be able to participate and give a presentation here. The title of my session this time is It’s easy to migrate files properly to Microsoft Teams (once you know how to do it).

In short, my session is about the following:

“Your new Teams are set up and configured with the structures that are suitable for your business. All employees have received the training needed to be able to work in the right way and in the same way. Now all that remains is the fun of moving in.

In my session you will get some good tips on how you and your colleagues can migrate files from “old sources” to your new Teams (and in the right way). You will also get tips on when you need to use migration tools.”

The scenarios we are going to go through are the following:

  • Move documents from OneDrive for Business to Microsoft Teams.
  • Move documents from existing sites in SharePoint Online to Microsoft Teams.
  • Move documents from existing sites in SharePoint On premise to Microsoft Teams.
  • Move documents from file shares to Microsoft Teams.

Everyone is welcome to this event which has many great sessions and many topics so there is something of interest for everyone. Hope to see you there!

Follow this link to stay up-to-date on the schedule, speakers and registration.

Updates that are now being rolled out in Microsoft 365

In addition to the Microsoft 365 Message Center (which is only available to those who are administrators of Microsoft 365), the Microsoft 365 Roadmap is the public primary source of information when you want to get an overview of the updates and features that are under development or rolling out in Microsoft 365 .

RoadMapAll

To avoid scrolling through the entire list (because it’s a long-running list), in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, you can select the services you are interested in and filter by the status that is relevant.

1 Roadmapelements

If you save the filtered views that are of most interest to you, you do not have to select and filter each time. The picture below shows how to do this in a very simple way. Continue reading “Updates that are now being rolled out in Microsoft 365”

Microsoft Teams + Edge Chromium? Here’s how to get rid of those annoying additional logins.

Are these login boxes familiar? Keep on reading!

They often show up if you are using Edge Chromium as your browser and, from the Microsoft Teams client, open a file in “Files”or if you try to open the Team SharePoint site. (and also sometimes when You open a tab that shows a file).

Continue reading “Microsoft Teams + Edge Chromium? Here’s how to get rid of those annoying additional logins.”

How do you keep track of when an Office 365 group is deleted?

I myself have relied on “Activity Alerts” in the Security & Compliance Center and it has worked well. As soon as someone deletes, for example, a Team or a Planner, a notification is sent to a team channel in my Governance Center and then I know that it might be something I should look into. Continue reading “How do you keep track of when an Office 365 group is deleted?”

Why Microsoft Teams is the key to successful collaboration

Collaboration in the past

I would like to start by telling you how i went from Lotus Notes, via SharePoint to Microsoft Teams.

Since 1997 I have been working on building systems for “collaboration”. The first few years I worked as a Lotus Notes-developer. Lotus Notes was at that time, in my personal opinion, the most effective platform for building good collaboration solutions. With Lotus Notes, i built document management solutions, good process support with automated workflows, ordering and booking systems, intranets and HR solutions. You could basically build most of it.

Best of all was that once you had built a good solution you could save it as a template. This template could then be used to quickly build the same, or similar solution elsewhere.

The replication in Lotus Notes means that you can distribute the load over different servers and you as a user can also replicate the databases so that you can work offline on your local computer when you do not have access to the Internet (this was during the time you did not always have access to fast internet everywhere and all the time).

Files were attached to Notes documents and you could use the email to attach links to the Notes documents which in turn contained those files. That’s how you (or at least i) did it “at that time”…

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Photo by David Klein on Unsplash

SharePoint shows up

Continue reading “Why Microsoft Teams is the key to successful collaboration”

How to use Microsoft Teams to simplify O365 Governance

Did you miss my “How to use Microsoft Teams to simplify O365 Governance” session at the Oktoberfest virtual summit, a.k.a. “TeamsFest”, hosted by European Teams User Group? Below you can see and download what you may have missed and that interests you.

(If you do not know how to use the governance plans, you can watch the session for clarity.)

Things to Know Before Your Organization Opens Up to Use Private Channels in Microsoft Teams

Let me start by saying that I love new functionality that creates opportunities and solves concrete needs, BUT: Having a holistic perspective when managing your organization’s productivity platform is a puzzle with many pieces. In my opinion, there are mainly three pieces you need to fit together as soon as possible if you are to succeed in introducing new functionality into an organization. These pieces are: Continue reading “Things to Know Before Your Organization Opens Up to Use Private Channels in Microsoft Teams”

Do you use Private chats instead of Channel Conversations? Think about it and do it right.

Private chats in Microsoft Teams is super easy and intuitive to use but are you sure you are using it for the right purpose? When you start a Private Chat and share files in this chat, the files are saved on your OneDrive for Business folder and they are only available to the participants in the chat conversation. Are you sure it is so smart to save these files to your OneDrive? Continue reading “Do you use Private chats instead of Channel Conversations? Think about it and do it right.”