Webinar Recap | 10 Hidden Microsoft 365 Gems | Unlock the true value of your Microsoft 365 License.
Thanks for your interest in “10 Hidden Microsoft 365 Gems | Unlock the true value of your Microsoft 365 License.” If you were able to join us for the webinar, we sincerely thank you for being there. We hope you had as much fun getting to learn about Microsoft 365 as our speakers did sharing their knowledge with you.
Didn’t get a chance to catch our session live? We’ve got you covered.
This Session:
Some truly powerful tools have gone untapped, and we want to change that. Microsoft 365 is made up of more than 20 apps and thousands of features, making it daunting to get a grasp on all that’s available. But what’s possible? And how can you use these features to simplify or elevate your processes? From shortcuts to automation to improved meetings, after this webinar recording, you’ll walk away with 10 practical tips to help you make 2023 your best year ever.
Episode Takeaways:
- Learn where you might be overspending and how our hidden gems can help you save $$
- Unveil 10 Microsoft 365 apps/features and how they can improve your daily work
- See our tips and tricks in action—real use cases with step-by-step instructions to apply them today
Show Links:
Key Takeaways
13:30 Track employees’ wellbeing with Viva Insights
14:40 “The idea of Viva Insights for managers is to help leadership management monitor their employees. Viva Insights is not looking to jeopardize any privacy here – it’s designed to help managers and leadership understand how their team is working.”
15:23 “It’s looking to provide more like behavioral insights into how people are working and their general well-being, trying to help look for employee engagement, efficiency, general culture, how people are doing, organizational resiliency, things like that. There’s also a best practices feature, which is available to everybody and it’s Viva Insights offering the guidance on how to create a better community within the organization and the actions to be taking. To keep everybody aligned, to increase the productivity, and prevent that employee burnout that a lot of us have seen.”
20:25 Microsoft Planner: A+ Project Management
20:26 “I’m actually going back to Viva on this one because Planner, a lot of us use it. To me, this is around productivity, automation and, again, the employee experience. The quick overview for those of you still new to Planner or haven’t touched it – Microsoft Planner is a project management software that has been out since last year, 2022. Viva Goals, I think, is going to be one of my big things in the community for 2023 because I believe it is a really solid goal-setting technique for an organization, and it’s really cool. So, this is around that productivity, that visibility, helping the different people within the organization agree with what output is looking like on a monthly/quarterly/yearly basis.”
21:28 “Planner, now connected into Goals can help set up the tasks, break down how you’re going to be achieving success – and this ties directly into Viva Goals. So, as you are working through your tasks within plan, or those can get automatically pushes into the vehicles, which can help show, give you visibility in the successive, you meeting, the request requirements, the commitments, the scorecard that you have with your organization.”
22:21 “I also put in cost savings within Planner, because many of you might be using other project management software that may be causing a lot of extra money, but planners included and most android five licenses. So if you need light project management, and say we had your org, we use DevOps, we use Jira, we use different tools to help with our big projects, but sometimes when we just need a quick little review, we need quick buckets, we need quick ways to be able to track something small – we’re going to use Planner. The bigger platforms provide more than we need, and Planner is a wonderful tool that almost everyone in org uses it in one way or another.”
23:20 Microsoft Forms: Gather information easily
25:10 “You can create these simple forms, you can also create quizzes, polls, general surveys, maybe you had a client project and you just want quick feedback as to how it went. Create a quick simple form with Microsoft forms that doesn’t take long. It takes minutes, and it’s already integrated into everything you’re doing. It’s just easy to use, easy to customize, very easy to share, you can also share with your external customers.”
27:50 OneDrive as your online storage
28:08 “OneDrive is your cloud storage. It’s backed by SharePoint, effectively it’s a UI on top of SharePoint. OneDrive is included in your M365/O365 license, you can get a free version for your own personal use within Windows, or at least Windows 11 now. But a lot of you are using other external tools for file sharing, or for online cloud storage, such as Dropbox or Google Cloud. You’re paying extra for what’s included in Microsoft. So, pricing is huge.”
32:05 “Now the one thing I wanted to demo here, that I find a lot of you aren’t using, is my tricks around syncing. OneDrive and SharePoint allows us to co-author documents really well – another reason why basically everything should be in your OneDrive. If everything is in your OneDrive, Cloud Storage and SharePoint, it’s just so easy to go work with them to co-author.”
Check out the recording for a OneDrive selective sync & co-authoring demo.
37:10 Power BI
38:01 “Power BI is going to help you, or help your leadership work with the data across so many things; you can get SharePoint utilization data, so you can understand who’s using SharePoint throughout your site. You can take these Power BI reports, put them into Excel, put them into Outlook, and work with them with the apps that you use. If you need data visualisations, Power BI is where you start.”
38:39 “How I would start with this, is that there is a freemium version based within your M365 license so most likely start to work with that, and then the people that need the data will be the ones you would assign those licenses to – to build the dashboards, build the reports, get the visualizations to discover new information, get the patterns out of the data to be able to make better business decisions.”
39:40 Speaker Coach
39:59 “Anybody that’s running a meeting in Teams, this is something that you can do to help you be an effective communicator. PowerPoint has something as well, it has a rehearse with coach which is very similar to Speaker Coach, using the same AI but it’s a different output.”
40:45 “Within Teams you have this idea of this private coach that is giving you real-time information as to how you were communicating within the meeting. Things that Speaker Coach in Teams is evaluating is your pacing, your general pitch, how many filler words you use, the “ums”, the “ams”, the “uhs”, and those kinds of things. Also, the informal speech you may be using, how many euphemisms you might be using, and if you’re using culturally insensitive terms and how you’re doing there.”
46:27 FindTime
46:42 “It’s an Outlook plugin so it does require Outlook, but it helps with scheduling. Now, all of us have problems with scheduling meetings,. You ask well, when are you free? and you’re talking to like five people over e-mails, or calling, and no one knows, and they go to check their calendar – it’s really frustrating.”
47:18 “But it’s an Outlook plugin that helps people reach consensus on finding times for a meeting, and that’s huge. It allows for one or more attendees to be able to then vote. So, when you set up the FindTime for the meeting, you select one, or more times that the AI has determined that people are available. FindTime then automatically sends out e-mails to everybody that asks them to vote on the times that they would prefer. Once the consensus has been had, the system automatically goes on to schedule it for everybody, sends it out, shows up on Outlook and synchronises the calendar.”
Check out the recording for a FindTime demo.
50:09 Power Automate flows to manage emails
51:00 “If you have repetitive tasks that you want to have automatically generated, it helps you create those automations.”
51:18 “Individuals can easily create workflows that tie into your M365 data. One of them, my favorite one, is around automating email – automating the moving of email. An easy example of this is, every time a support email comes in, I want it automatically moved into a specific folder for me. So it doesn’t just go dumped into my inbox, but it gets pushed into a support email folder.”
52:28 “There are easy ways to create this, you can use templates, you can tweak a template, or you can create your own from scratch. It is just really a great way to move email. You could also extend it – let’s say you’re managing an email or you’ve got emails that come in, say from clients, and you want certain emails in certain ways to be automatically pushed into a Teams channel – you can do that through automation. So as it comes in, you don’t even have to see it, don’t have to set up rules in Outlook. It happens before it gets to you, when an email comes in.”
Check out the recording for a Power Automate and email demo.
53:17 Save attached email files to your OneDrive
53:22 “So many email attachments just get lost. They come in, you forget where they are. You can easily set up a flow that will take any attachment and dump it into your personal or corporate OneDrive, and you can decide what folder you want it in. You can also filter out that only emails that come in in a certain way from a certain person, a certain group or have certain subject messages – to go ahead and automatically move those files into a OneDrive folder.” “If you have repetitive tasks that you want to have automatically generated, it helps you create those automations.”
57:14 Capture meeting notes like a pro
57:27 “This one is about capturing meeting notes that so many of us have to do. There is a Power App for free called Meeting Capture. And I’m going to skip straight to this, because I want to show you what this looks like and how you’re going to get to this.”
Check out the recording for a Meeting Capture demo.
And there you have it! We hope this recap has provided some valuable insights that you can put into practice. Check out the recording for more details on this content.
Make sure to join us at our next webinar on March 23rd , where we’ll break down Viva Connections and Viva Engage and help you visualize how they can join forces to transform your employee experience.
