Office 365: STOP email chaos - TAKE ACTION

Why are you sending an EMAIL?   Stop and ask yourself; take action - be a disruptor by reinventing how you communicate.

 How many emails a day do you get which don’t require any ACTION from you?  

How many emails a day do you get where you are on the CC line which requires ACTION from you?

How many emails a day contain file attachments which are INFORMATIONAL only?

How many emails a day contain file attachments where FEEDBACK is requested?

How many daily emails do you put YOURSELF on the CC or BCC lines?

Have you STOPPED and asked yourself; what is the purpose of this email message?

Here is a sampling of a 7-day cycle of emails depicting what was "called out" in the email as ACTIONABLE (2%).  This number does not include accepting, declining, or tentative meeting requests.

How do you measure PRODUCTIVITY?   

By the number of emails you have in your inbox;

by the number of emails you send;

by Carbon Copying EVERYONE to build your BRAND.  

How productive are you with hundreds or emails a day.

Can we reduce the number of emails one receives in a day?   Would I be more focused on the working at hand?   During a construction project you can see the results of your work through gratification of seeing an outcome.   The challenge is for all of us to stop the chaos currently going on within the email platform.   My guess is you measure PRODUCTIVITY by the total number of emails sent and received along with the total number of meetings on your calendar.    Hmmm…   if you are reading or typing email; or if you are in a meeting explain the gratification you might see at the outcome of the meeting?

Okay, I know you are saying that you have shared information, made a decision, brainstorming for content as called out in examples from effectivemeetings.com.   Others might be looking at how they get work done using other means to increase their productivity.  My challenge is for all to consider alternatives to the following list of emails; I'll bet everyone is sending.  

STOP sending stuff that is not relevant to me (IT'S NOISE); taking me away from the work at hand. 

To SHARE a bit of INFORMATION

To COVER YOUR BUTT

To ask a QUESTION to a specific person

To start a discussion about a TOPIC

To COORDINATE A MEETING with two or more people

To REMIND yourself that you sent an email by resending to yourself (i.e. CC or BCC yourself)

To gain notoriety by REPLY ALL to an email chain (i.e. Welcome email to new co-worker)

To communicate a story with more than ONE POINT (i.e. Status Report; Sales Update)

To ask someone do take ACTION to complete an active required to conduct BUSINESS

Do you have a subscription to Office 365?

If you do, keep reading…ONLY if you'd like to gain some value from your investment.   In my humble opinion, Microsoft has continued to be the software provider for the most complex, comprehensive, and scalable productive tools fully integrated into desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

Discover, Exploit, Disrupt, Explore different technics to purposefully "do work"

STOP sending an email message to random people	ALTERNATE using Office 365
SHARE a bit of INFORMATION Resulting:   empower others to determine what is relevant to them by opt-in; or when required to read add a requirement to sign what has been read. Secret:   Millennials really like being empowered; outside of email	Publish an article on your company intranet Publish an article to your department intranet Publish an article to your group (team) intranet Post a file in a common location Provide guidance on labeling content to create findable content Post in an Office 365 Group Use ONENOTE to capture INFORMATION outside of an email conversation thread
To COVER YOUR BUTT	Starting building "TRUST" and "RELATIONSHIPS"
To ask a QUESTION to a specific person	Use DELVE to surface who might be an expert Use SEARCH to surface who might have already asked the question Use INSTANT MESSAGE to ask them Submit to a DISCUSSION BOARD to allow many to respond Voice CALL them leave a Voice Mail; they may be able to reply using an EMAIL or INSTANT MESSAGE
To start a discussion about a TOPIC	DISCUSSION BOARDS allow for gamification YAMMER GROUPS allow for focused topics OFFICE GROUPS allow for focused topics
To COORDINATE A MEETING with two or more people	Share your CALENDAR with others Leverage add-ins such as FINDTIME Use a short EXCEL SURVEY
To REMIND yourself that you sent an email by resending to yourself (i.e. CC or BCC yourself
To gain notoriety by REPLY ALL to an email chain (i.e. Welcome email to new co-worker)
To communicate a story with more than ONE POINT (i.e. Status Report; Sales Update)
To ask someone do take ACTION to complete an active required to conduct BUSINESS	SEND THEM AN EMAIL :-)  add <action> in subject ADD an item to PLANNER and assign it to them (you'll see how busy they are) ADD an item to their TASK list

  

Grow your company align with the vision and goals by empowering everyone to be experts through advanced Collaboration.

Additional information

Get to know Office Delve:  Delve helps you find all the information you need in one place.

Are my documents safe in Office Delve?  Yes, your documents are safe. Delve never changes any permissions.

Increased Transparency in a digital world - Ways to think about increasing transparency using technology that is available today

Office 365 E5: Discover Synergies with Delve Analytics

 With Office 365 E5 Microsoft has combined their most advanced workloads into a single powerful bundle.  I’d would like to continue the conversation about the changes with E5 building from my colleague’s blog post.  In the post each of the workloads are called out.  This post will examine Productivity and the ability to measure your personal productivity easily through a dashboard.  While at the same time interacting with content created by your teams and changing from search to discoverability.

The E5 Suite

 

Many articles describe the E5 Microsoft's Productivity suite as “dial tone” in the cloud.  In the next few moments, it’s important for you to read on; E5 to me is a platform for true business transformation.  E5 with Delve analytics (“machine learning”) will revolution and improve how you work as an individual among your enterprise and groups within the enterprise.  The E5 bundle is broken down into 3 core areas of focus.  We will examine Delve Analytics in this post.  We “delve” into Why, How, What is Delve Analytics.

 

Why Delve Analytics?

Delve Analytics is about providing insights into personal productivity.  As a productivity evangelist; I tend to find the shortest path and least resistant path to completing an activity or task.  Every information works differently; image for a moment having a “dashboard” to quickly see how you’re working.

 

Delve Analytics goes beyond a productivity enhancer; it provides a view into your ability to balance work and personal along with your best ways for communicating with others.  If you want to understand how the collaboration work is interacting with others and getting work done; keep reading to explore Delve Analytics further.

 

Delve Organizational Analytics builds on the current Delve features and gives additional personalized insights from the most commonly utilized user data and coworker interactions. A dashboard has been added to measure, track and identify key trends such as frequently used team documents and leading team interactions.

 

 

How does Delve Analytics work?

While we will dive much deeper into Delve Analytics, there are a few important details to bear in mind as you consider the platform as a whole.  Office looks at “actors” (ME), action types, time, and weight, along with objects (documents or people).  This creates relationships and trends around a “user centric” view using modified and viewed actions.  These are also known as social and content “Signals”.  “Signals” are security aware; therefore, content is shared only to those in your network.

 

You'll see your own documents from across Office 365, and documents that your colleagues are working on.  You'll only see documents you have access to. Other people will not see your private documents.

 

What is Delve Analytics?

Delve Analytics—Empowers individuals through rich dashboards that provide insights on time and relationships, with the goal of helping individuals get time back and spend it effectively.  Delve provides “cards” similar to the customer version of Pinterest.  Delve using machine learning who you interact with and types of content being created. 

• Quickly there are a number of items to see in one view.
• Machine learning spots trends, makes suggestions, allows for folksonomy boards
• Simple to view cards display information
• Add to a board
• Make a comment in a conversation
• See who as access to the content
• Email a link to the content

 

Boards let you group documents and get back to them later.  Boards (similar to Pinterest) are easy to share, too. You can, for example, create a board to pin important topical documents and share the link to your team.   This provides an enabling experience for users without long wait times for Information Technology to setup and configure or define a project to create a productivity tool.

 

Boards are open; however, if a board has documents that you don't have access to, those documents will not show up for you.  Share a link to invite relevant participates to follow the board and pin other content of interest.

 

Get your organization involved with discovering content transforming search to discoverability, building networks for innovation using greater transparency throughout your organization. 

 

Grow your company align with the vision and goals by empowering everyone to be experts through advanced Collaboration.

 

Additional information

Get to know Office Delve:  Delve helps you find all the information you need in one place.

Are my documents safe in Office Delve?  Yes, your documents are safe. Delve never changes any permissions.

Increased Transparency in a digital world - Ways to think about increasing transparency using technology that is available today

 

 

 

 

7 Steps to SharePoint 2013 HA Farm in Azure

QUESTION:  How many months, weeks, days does it take to provision the infrastructure to deploy your SharePoint FARM?   What if with careful design and planning; you’ll be up and running in minutes using the Azure cloud to configure, deploy, and manage all the infrastructure required for you next SharePoint deployment.

The REMAINING time can be focused on INNOVATION and GROWTH of BUSINESS activities required to drive your business to the next level with more focus.

You can now easily deploy a two or three-tier SharePoint Server 2013 farm in Azure. This is designed to help you quickly create an Internet-facing SharePoint farm for dev/test, demonstration, or proof-of-concept purposes.

The SharePoint 2013 HA Farm template deploys a SharePoint Server 2013 three-tier farm topology including Active Directory Domain Services and Microsoft SQL Server in a high-availability configuration with nine servers and 29 cores (using default virtual machine sizes). The completed deployment consists of two Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controllers, two SQL Server 2014 servers and a cluster majority node server configured with SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, and four SharePoint Server 2013 servers (two web front ends and two application servers).

Each farm is configured with just a single web application and site collection. The SharePoint service application deployment is left to you to configure.

Create a SharePoint HA Farm in Minutes using Azure Deployment template.   Focus on the WHY Focus on the WHEN   Less focus on HOW; let the Azure Deployment wizard guide you through the installation.

 

 

SharePoint farm name	Name our FARM
Subscription Type	Based on your subscription enrollment
Resource Group	Resource Group to manage your resources
Location	Where in the World you want to host?

 

 

 

Username	Administrator account to manage the virtual machines
Password	Password for the account
Confirm Password
Storage account name prefix	Prefix to name your storage account
Storage account type   With estimate pricing per Month for Storage per 100GB; pick the storage configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Virtual Network Name	Name of the Virtual network or reuse an existing one already created

 

 

 

Forest root domain name	Fully qualified domain name
Active Directory virtual machine size   With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements

 

 

 

SQL Server virtual machine size   With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
SQL Witness virtual machine size   With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Service account name	Account to run the SQL services
Service account password	Account password
Confirm password

 

 

 

Public IP address for SharePoint web tier	Name space for Public IP address to get assigned
Domain name label for SharePoint web tier	DNS label for SharePoint web tier
SharePoint virtual machine size   With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Setup user account username & password	Domain account used to run setup SharePoint product installation
Server farm account username & password	Domain account used to run the SharePoint Central Administration services
SharePoint farm passphrase	Secure the farm used to protect farm; required to join additional resources to the farm
Content Site Template

 

 

 

You may want to download the template as JSON to create another FARM as required for test, stage, acceptance, pre-production, or for any other purpose required by defining the requirements for your environments.

 

 

 

 

 

Additional Information

Microsoft Azure Documentation Center –

 

Office 365 talk

The part that is still a bit unknown is SharePoint.

Specifically, we would need to have a SharePoint server in-house, running a hybrid environment.

What is drives this decision?

Hybrid deployments are complex and costly requiring multiple servers

Points of concern:

We want to be able to work locally and remotely; however, the remote option is secondary to quickly accessing files from a server internally. 

– Using SharePoint Online allows for work on any device, anywhere, anytime – you need a USERNAME / PASSWORD or optionally configure multi-factor authentication.

We are not willing to put everything in the Microsoft cloud as it just doesn't work for us operationally speaking.

Can you describe your typical operational day for the different types of workers?

We have tried to implement systems in the past where we asked people to download files in a check-in/check-out process people have to download things continuously to work with them offline

One Drive for Business allows for editing within the browser; no download; no check out; however, depends a bit on those operational process and the type of worker

We also need to be able to have both Microsoft files as well as Adobe Creative Suite files in the same client directories. 

Document libraries are what they are called; they can store many different file types; there are some files which are excluded (such as viruses signatures) and any type of executable file.

Surrounding the SharePoint hybrid I wanted to give you a bit more information so you can plan accordingly and get me the most accurate pricing. We can assume we would have less than 250 users accessing SharePoint Server 2013. So I believe we need 1 SharePoint Server 2013 license and 250 CALs. 

A lot! A typical on premise installation without Hybrid in the equation is 3 servers; 4 if you plan to use Web Applications; 3 SharePoint Server Licenses and 1 SQL Server License. If we start to introduce any type of Business Intelligence generally this installed on its own server. When we talk about Hybrid; then some additionally PROXY servers are necessary to allow on premise to talk to online.

Topical Traditional Typologies from Technet - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=257304 

3 Business Drivers for Collaboration

Hello, I spend much of my time talking to IT about SharePoint installations or upgrades. Most of the time spent answering questions about what is the recommended practice for installation or upgrading. In the back of my mind, I can’t stop thinking about those business users who are not involved. As a business owner myself working with my wife trying to grow a small local Office Cleaning business, I can’t wonder what IT business drivers are requiring to install or upgrade SharePoint. As a business owner, I spend a lot of time innovating new ways to connect to potential customers for my wife.

As a thought leader, we need to look to increase revenue identifying key business drivers.  Does this seem logical?  The business drivers to build laser focus aligning individuals and business revenue could leverage three (3) key business drivers and phrase differently by Isaac Getz at at Ted video.

• Enable Employees to increase innovation (personal growth)
• Make it easy to collaborate with others inside and outside the company (self-direction)
• Improve employee cohesiveness (intrinsic equality)

Define your Best in Class Collaboration  questions?

• is your SharePoint installation healthy, engaging, and easy to navigate?
• did IT install a version use in IT and say, hey this might help our business?
• did IT train the business how to upload a document into a document library?
• does the company use a common set of terms to describe your business?
• are you willing to work in new ways?

Collaboration Attributes to consider to achieve those business drivers

Searchable – content (documents, excel spreadsheets, power point presentations, pdf, video, email) should be easy to find; do you have employees with complex folder structures in email housing tribal knowledge? Perhaps storing files on file shares; are some of those files dated with 05/31/2005? Is it easy to take the contents with you remotely; do you have employees using unsanctioned methods sharing 8 year old content? How easily is it to truly collaborate (co-author a document together) with someone external to your company; for that matter internally. Is this use case using “best in class” collaboration tools?

Champion – Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl Champion. Not exactly what your “best in class” collaboration solution is looking for (Unless you are Seahawk fan)? Oh, you assigned someone in IT who trained those users how to upload a document. Ask yourself; does the IT person also know your business and what it takes to increase revenue or get others engaged to collaborate about innovative ways to work differently?  I dare you to find a business knowledgeable person who is not interested in being a champion.

Real-time – does your collaboration happen in real-time? Does your business make decisions with information using currently entered transaction data or updated compliance procedures? Do you believe analyzing a specific market segment or maybe a customer segment could be key to increasing revenue?

Drive development, sales, marketing activities – Do you block Twitter, Facebook, and other Social collaboration outlets; or do you bring into your collaborative environment data which could prove to increase your revenue? What percentage of your employees are engaged to drive such activities both internally and externally?

Embedded into day to day activities – Collaboration embedded into day to day activities engages employee’s and removes perceptions while enabling ability to increase revenue. Is there a process in your company which starts and stops; perhaps even halts completely when some is on vacation or leaves the company.

Unafraid of disruptive innovation – Collaboration encourages disruption; have you have been instant messaged during a great song on your iPod? Perhaps, you were disrupted by a telephone call only to find out it was a wrong number or worse yet; your boss asking why the your sales plan is not completed.

How do you rate your collaboration attributes… “BEST IN CLASS”?   Yup, SharePoint is installed or Nope, we need to talk to Marketing and other departments outside of IT.

IT and Business Areas site down together to work out some specific use cases and metrics; do be afraid of each other or intimidate the other by saying “NO” or “You cost too much”.

There are best practices for “best in class”; start with business drivers and align them with your business objectives “increase revenue”.

Give it a try work differently!

Do Open-ended Questions lead to conversations?

Alright, so you have allowed employees to bring their devices of choice.  Now what?  

You first need to provide some governance and allow for some input from those outside IT and Security to help balance security and usability.  We are not going to talk about “device management” (However, there are mature tools available).

We are discussing your challenges to providing methods for communication and interaction beyond phone calls, text messaging, and email.  These types of interacts are generally “closed” conversations or “private”.   

By providing some additional controlled methods to communicate creating higher transparency and encouraging broader collaboration to improve processes, increase revenue, giving others a voice to sharing ideas and thoughts.  

I ask, if you have seen the Movie JOBS; he challenges his team to provide him with a device that can play music with no constraints, do you believe Steve Jobs was encouraging collaboration.

By providing a place for employees to start a conversation (outside of email) in an “open” area or “public”; you may even want to include some business partners outside your company as part of your extended team.

Give it try!  Post an open-ended question about increasing revenue, reducing costs, or seek productivity improvement ideas.  Then, encourage and reward engagement through some specific controlled questions back to those engaged.  You might be surprised with some of the responses especially when your audience is provided a channel directly into your decision makers.

Consider this hypothesis:  What if you post a question such as; “Please share your ideas to increase revenue for (a product or a service)?  Pick something related to your companies’ ability to generate revenue.  Give it try; what question did you post to get your company engaged to increase revenue?  Did you follow up with a controlled question to sharpen your sword?

6 Requirements mapped to SharePoint

Requirements listed with some quick links to more details:

Requirement	Capabilities
Give us a place to put all files (possibly including CAD)	Document Library – working with document libraries
Allow us to search for a document based on keywords found inside the document or in the file-name?	Crawling and crawled properties
Allow us to categorize documents based on certain criteria (accounting, customer name, etc) for faster searches?	Content Type workshop and planning for logical and physical configuration
Allow for archiving or purging old documents?  As we add more and more documents the storage needed will grow.  At some point we will need to purge.	Information Management policy
Allow for revision control of files so we can easily see and maintain multiple versions of files	Version control planning workshop for logical and physical configuration
Allow for easy access to files/folders for users across the WAN (small 1 meg connection)?	SkyDrive Pro or Office Web Applications including Browser support planning and mobile support planning along with overall capacity planning