My first 100 days with Office 365

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For the past couple of months, I've been using Office 365 -- a big shift after leaving IBM back in December. At the new gig, one of my responsibilities is to drive the implementation and adoption of Office 365 -- one of the various initiatives in moving to the cloud.

I'm still in the process of collecting data and measuring the adoption within the organization. Thus, wanted to start with my own experience and document my growing pains so far. One of the first things that I noticed is the breakout of apps and getting used to when to use what. For example for chats, I could do 1:1 messages over Skype, Teams, Yammer, and of course email. To see what's going on across the organization, I could use Newsfeed, Yammer, or Delve.  To keep track of tasks, I could use Planner, Tasks, or OneNote. There's a 60-page white paper that explains when to use what, but this seems like a big area for Microsoft to look at consolidating.

So here's my experience so far with some of these apps.

Outlook

After using Notes/Verse for about 15 years, the transition to Outlook was "interesting". I do like the meeting forward feature. Makes it easy to get others added to an invite, instead of having to ask the meeting owner to add others. Of course, it's also happened where people I've invited to a meeting have forwarded the invite to others without my consent 😁. I also like scheduling Skype meeting directly from within Outlook.

Here's a few things I struggled with (in no particular order):

• Getting used to tons of open windows - in Notes, emails opened within the same app by default and it didn't clutter your desktop. In Outlook (at least on Mac) there's windows everywhere!
• Distribution lists - there doesn't seem to be a way to build my own public distribution lists. They have the concept of Groups, but emails sent to a Group doesn't come into the inbox, it goes to another separate inbox so people miss them. 
• Delegation - I was used to easily delegating meetings to other people. Within Outlook, I need to forward an invitation, and then decline the invite so the person knows I'm not going.
• Emojis - This may be a simple one, but for some reason the emojis seem to get lost when sending/receiving messages. A happy face, for example, is converted to J . It took me a while to figure out why people were putting J's in their emails. 😉

Skype

This is one that I've struggled with the most. At the end of the day, Skype for Business is the same Lync client, just re-branded so that's probably why the experience is not the best. I was expecting the actual consumer version of Skype. My pain points:

• I have a million "conversations" with the same person (see above). This seems to be the biggest pain point that Skype for Business users are reporting. This is horrible as the conversation for some crazy reason is broken into multiple chats. Notice above how my conversation with Mara, which happened in a span of 20 minutes, is broken into 3 different conversations. Thus, when I'm trying to find what one person and I talked about, I have to dig through multiple conversations to find what I need. Ugh!!! Microsoft Teams 1:1 chat addresses this. Similarly, Sametime, a contact was just a contact and it was a lot simpler to browse the chat history. 
• I can't paste images into a conversation - this seems to be a Mac limitation
• Video calls are flaky - Microsoft Teams has been better in my experience so far
• Missed conversations emails - An interesting feature that Skype has is that if you "miss" a conversation, you get an email alerting you. However, it's happened way too much that I'm online and connected and engaged, and yet somehow I get an email that I missed a conversation when I really didn't.

Teams

Teams is the latest app that Microsoft has added to Office 365. It competes with the likes of Slack IBM Watson Workspace. I decided to give Teams a try and get my team engaged in it. One of the capabilities that I like is the integrated Planner module where I've built kanban boards to keep track of high level project status. 

The integrated video meeting experience is really great as well, in fact, I like it a lot more than the Skype for Business experience. You can take a "typed" conversation to a "visual" conversation very easily and still remain in context.

Some improvements I would like to see:

• Planner on mobile - Right now, the Teams mobile app for iOS doesn't allow me to see/manage tasks on mobile. Also, Planner on Teams doesn't work well with the standalone Planner app in Office 365. New tasks/boards created in Teams don't show up in the Planner hub forcing me to check two different places for a consolidated view.
• Stability for the desktop app on Mac - The desktop app for Mac is built on Electron so at the end of the day it's just a web browser wrapped in a rich desktop app. For some reason, it's still very flaky. For example, when I switch to the Planner tab in a team, it seems to hang. Other times, the app doesn't start correctly and I've had to re-install several times. 
• Native notifications - as notifications come in, Microsoft doesn't seem to be using native notifications on Mac OS X so if I step out and come back, I can't see what I missed within Notification Center
• Threaded replies usability - We are still getting used to threaded replies. Right now, it seems very confusing as sometimes people reply to the thread and other times they just reply as a new message. At the same time, when a new reply comes in to a thread, it moves within the conversation and it breaks the flow of other conversations. 
• Awareness usability - Notifications don't seem to be reliable at the moment as the team constantly reports that they miss out on new activity and since things move around in the conversation, it makes it hard to understand when someone will get notified of a new message. @mentions seem to be the best way to drive awareness of new content.
• Single version of the truth - sharing a OneDrive file into a Team creates another copy of the file and saves it in the Team's file repository. This makes it complicated as now we have to manage two copies of the file and manually keep them in sync. Ideally, sharing a OneDrive file into the team, gives the team access to the file providing a single version of the truth.

I also like some of the top ideas requested by users for Teams.

OneDrive for Business

It looks like Microsoft has been improving their OneDrive client recently. I've been able to sync my personal OneDrive and SharePoint sites to my Mac seamlessly. Some things could still be improved:

• Sharing files from desktop - I'm used to right-clicking on a file and being able to share a file with a colleague. With OneDrive, you are forced to open a browser, log in, find the file and then share it from there. IBM Connections, Box, and others have had this for a long time so Microsoft is behind on this one. 
• Cloud file sync improvements - From within PowerPoint, Excel and Word, you can share a file with others, BUT not if you open the file directly from Finder. You need to again, open a browser, log in, find the file and choose "Edit in PowerPoint" (for example) so that the file opens from the cloud. It would be a lot better if PowerPoint detected that I'm opening a file from Finder that's being already synced to OneDrive/SharePoint.
• Copy link to OneDrive files - This is another one that kills me... Sometimes I'm in a Skype or Teams chat and I want to paste a link to a file. I'm used to right-clicking on a file directly from Finder and getting a link to a file. With OneDrive, I need to open a browser, log in, find the file, then copy the link to the file. 
• Finding files shared with me - There doesn't seem to be a view that shows me all files that I have access to. OneDrive has a "Shared with Me" view that only shows individual files where I've been explicitly added as a viewer/editor. However, if a file is in folder I have access to (and hence I have implicit access), those files don't show up there. This makes it hard to go back to a file that I know I have access to, but don't know where it is...
• Commenting on files - Unless I'm doing something wrong, there doesn't seem to be a way where viewers can comment on files. Comments in OneDrive seem to be "inside the file" so therefore, you need to be editor to be able to edit the file and add comments inside the file. This is a flaw since I don't want people to edit files, just review and give me feedback. It would also be nice to have @mentions in file comments.
• File update notifications - As my team works on files, I'm not notified when they make updates to their files or mine. We end up pinging each other or emailing each other to let each other know when a new file update is ready for review.

Surprisingly, none of these seem to be in the top ideas for OneDrive for Business...

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I'll stop here since this is getting long and it's been quite a brain dump. I want to start playing more with Delve, SharePoint and others and will share more on those later! 

Save The Date: Enterprise File Sync and Share is Just the Beginning of a New Way To Work

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Save the date. In less than a month, we'll be hosting a webinar to take you through the latest capabilities available in our IBM Connections Files offering, the IBM solution for organizations that are looking for enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) capabilities in the cloud.

IBM Connections Files on Cloud is designed for today’s mobile worker, providing a secure, easy-to-use, collaboration and file management environment for all size businesses. This cost-effective, secure file sharing solution is easy to implement using software-as-a-service (SaaS) on our cloud (or you can run it on-prem too). A user centric design allows anyone to confidently share files with their network of customers and partners, as well as sync online files to their favorite mobile devices and tablets (supports both Android and iOS mobile devices). Here's a quick video I had shared earlier of the IBM Connections for Mac app:


Ready to learn more? One of the Product Managers for IBM Connections, Jim Puckett, will be hosting a webcast. Check out the details below:

Date: September 24, 2015
Time: 1-2pm Eastern Time
Registration:  To register for the event, click here.

See you there!

IBM Connections Adds Secure File Sync and Share Offering On-premises

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Following the release last quarter of our secure file sync and share offering in cloud, today we have just released the equivalent offering for those customers who would like to deploy this on premises. This new offering gives customers a new way to buy IBM Connections and get just the Files portion of the platform. This makes it easy to get started and customers can grow and buy the entire IBM Connections suite once they are ready to use other capabilities such as Communities, Forums, Ideation, etc.

The capabilities have already been highly praised by analysts such as Forrester and OVUM. In fact, check out this report from OVUM to find out why IBM Connections is a strong candidate to provide all the benefits and features an enterprise user might need from a file sync and share solution.

This offering includes:

• Mobile apps for iOS and Android
• Desktop plugins for Microsoft Windows and Mac (including integration into Microsoft Office 365 Desktop apps such as Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel)
• External file sharing (ie. share files with people outside of your organization)
• Share files with individuals or groups
• Lock files for editing to prevent conflicts
• View files online without having to download
• Control who can view/edit your files and who can re-share them 
• View who has downloaded your files and which version they have
• See how the file has been shared throughout your organization
• and more... ! 

Available add-ons:

• Compliance and Governance support 
• Real-time co-editing of files without downloading 

Here's a demo of the plugins and mobile apps in action:



Enjoy!

IBM Connections is Now Available in the IBM Cloud marketplace

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As just communicated in the press release a few minutes ago, IBM Connections is now available in the IBM Cloud marketplace.  Here's the direct link in case you want to check it out.

The press release sums up the latest release of IBM Connections which is now available for download (in case you want to run it on premises) or in the cloud.

One of the highlights that we want to call out is the continued growth that we see in our ecosystem. For example, using our latest APIs and SDK, ISVs (independent software vendors) such as HootSuite, Bunchball, TemboSocial, ISW, among many, many others have created social apps on the IBM Connections Platform.

A key aspect of this release is secure external collaboration, where you can bring in external users (your customers, partners, suppliers, etc) into your IBM Connections deployment behind the firewall and still keep the right security boundaries to keep information safe. Jeff Schick, our VP for Social Software at IBM, calls out the importance of this:

When a workforce is out of synch or out of touch, the whole organization suffers from lost productivity, efficiency and innovation. With the open nature of today's business environment, organizations are looking to build new systems of people-centric engagement. The ability to bring key internal and external stakeholders into the conversation can facilitate a more collaborative, responsive and authentic way to work and deepen engagement.

Additionally, Superior Group's CIO, Tom DeClerck shares how IBM Connections has made the organization more agile by putting people back at the center of their business.  Speaking of Superior Group, here's a quick video that talks about the Superior Group's success on becoming a social business and the ROI they are achieving by using IBM Connections:



For more information, check out the entire press release.

Mark your calendars: Introducing IBM Connections Next !

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In less than a month, IBM will be introducing the newest, latest, and greatest release of IBM Connections.  Some of the latest capabilities were shown during the keynote demo at IBM Connect 2014.

Now, it's time to unveil everything that we've been working on for the past year or so and bring it to you.  The official unveiling will happen on May 21st so mark your calendars !

As we've done in other years, we'll host a virtual web conference and walk you through the new business challenges that IBM Connections can help solve for you.

At this point, I can't say too much about the new release besides what you may already know from IBM Connect 2014.

Having said that, I thought it would be good to give you a sneak peek at what we'll be announcing in less than 1 month.  Check out this preview that I created:



If you liked that, feel free to take the video above and embed in your own IBM Connections blogs, wikis, forums, etc. Spread the word!

To learn more and register for the event, click here.

Introducing File Sync for Mobile and More in IBM Connections 4.5 CR4

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A couple of hours ago, IBM Connections 4.5 CR4 was made available.  This new cumulative release introduces various new features, two of which specifically for mobile that I would like to focus on.

It's worth noting that these features are already available to our cloud customers so we are just wrapping these up and giving them to our on prem customers.

First, push notifications alert you when you have a new to-do (as seen below in the image), when someone asks to join one of your communities, or someone invites you to join their network.

Additionally, you can now select individual files to sync and work while you are offline. When syncing, the server will do a differential sync. That way if one of your co-workers updates only 1 slide in a 50MB presentation, only the particular slide that was changed will be sync, saving you time, battery, and bandwidth. If you don't have unlimited 3G/4G/LTE plan, you can also choose to sync only while connected to wifi.

Finally, you can also pick and choose which files to sync to which device. For example, you may only want 2-3 key presentations on your Android phone (or iPhone) while having 20-30 documents on your iPad where you can more easily edit the files.

Check out this 4 minute demo so you can see File Sync working in Mobile:


To see what else is new in IBM Connections 4.5 CR4, go here. To configure File Sync and push notifications, see the documentation here.