Atwork

Last week Martina and I have been speaking at Unity Connect in Haarlem in the Netherlands. Unity Connect is an IT conference about Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype, Yammer, and Azure and took place from 16th to 18th November 2016 in the beautiful city of Haarlem. We arrived on Tuesday evening and entered the stunning inner city of Haarlem with so many cool restaurants and bars. The banner picture of Unity Connect just gives a brief impression of the beautiful buildings in that small town. The conference location was in Philharmonie Haarlem which is actually a concert hall but a very cool event location. With the inner city and the hotels around the corner, this event is - besides the conference offerings - one of my absolute favorite places to go in this region. ...

The European SharePoint Conference took place in Vienna from 14th to 18th November 2016. We took this occasion to meet our friends from the Office 365 community in our home town Vienna for an informal come together aka #SharePintVienna. Right after the MVP Summit week in Redmond, we invited about 60 persons and more than 40 came to our come together at “TheRoom” near the city center for some drinks and dinner on the 14th November. See some snapshots of the evening in this Sway. ...

Each year, Microsoft invites members of the MVP program and the RD program to their headquarter in Redmond, Washington state. This year, the MVP Summit took place from 7th to 10th of November. As in the previous years, for Martina and me this event was a great occasion to come to Seattle area, to connect with other MVPs and Microsoft product managers and to provide feedback on Microsoft technologies. We met friends and colleagues from all over the world. ...

End of October, Martina and I have been at SharePoint days Conference (SPD) Slovenia. This was our first SharePoint conference in Slovenia in the beautiful small town of Bled which is just across the southern border of Austria. The location was very close from our home town Vienna (about 4 hours drive) and very close to our second home in Villach. SPD Slovenia took place from 24th to 25th October 2016 at Hotel Kompas in Bled. IMHO, Bled is in maybe one of the most beautiful regions in Europe with a small lake and surrounding mountains. There were 5 tracks and about 50 sessions, presented in English, see more about this great event at SPD Slovenia. ...

Nice numbers of our two Office-AddIns “TagCloud Generator” and “Like for Outlook”. Both Apps are available in the Microsoft Office Store. TagCloud Generator is a simple to use tagcloud generator for Microsoft Word (working with Word 2013 and above) and delivers an overview of a document rapidly. Like for Outlook enables users to send a Like with one click and works in Outlook 2013 or later, Outlook 2016 for Mac, Outlook on the Web. ...

Recently, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Regional Directors website at rd.microsoft.com. Finally! Our CEO, Martina Grom, was awarded as Regional Director in 2015, see here. So we are more than happy that there’s now a place where Microsoft informs officially about the Regional Director program. Check it out at rd.microsoft.com. Since it’s not well known, what the Regional Director award is about, there’s a FAQ list at rd.microsoft.com/FAQ. The most frequently asked questions are, if Regional Directors (RD’s) are employed by Microsoft, how they are selected or if they are also MVP. The FAQ’s answer these questions clearly, see the statements summarized here: ...

Last week, our third IT/DevConnections conference took place in Las Vegas. We had the pleasure to have several sessions there. The IT/DevConnections conference took place from 10th to 13th of October in the luxurious Aria resort that is located right in the middle of the famous Las Vegas strip. That’s a very cool location for obtaining KnowHow transfer during the day and enjoying the nightlife of Vegas. Besides the networking at the conference, there were social events and parties. ...

It has been a busy week when we’ve been at Microsoft Ignite conference 2016 which took place in Atlanta from 26th to 30th September. This was Microsoft’s second Ignite conference (the first one happened in Chicago in May 2015, see here) with more than 20.000 people attending and more than 1.000 sessions. For us, it was our first time in the US South (in Georgia) and we enjoyed it very much. ...

We at atwork are now official Microsoft Authorized Education Partner (AEP). The AEP program authorizes atwork to purchase and re-sell academic priced products to Qualified Educational Users. Microsoft informs about the details on https://www.mepn.com/MEPN/AEPHome.aspx. The short description reads as follows: The AEP program authorizes partners to purchase and re-sell academic priced products to Qualified Educational Users. The program is designed to increase customer and partner satisfaction and to improve communication and service to our partners with a standard set of terms and conditions, improved training, and new resources and tools to keep the channel informed with up to date information on new products and events, in addition to guarding against channel miss-selling of academic licensing. ...

Delegate365 will receive a major update in October. This will be Delegate365 version 6 and will include a change in the audit logging system, a new license history and a preview for more custom automation features. Read the first details here. Change of logging: With the next update to version 6, the audit logging will be changed. There is a switch implemented which allows D365 to store logged data in various spaces and formats. The following graphics shows an overview at a glance about the planned features. Data will no longer be stored in the Web in CSV format, but in the D365 database for up to 90 days and in Azure storage in JSON format forever. Direct Access of Azure storage: Besides of the almost unlimited space in Azure storage, data in that storage can be accessed directly (if you have the permissions). This allows Portal Admins to generate a URL with a token with an expiration date to download the produced log files. The token is issued by D365, as tool you can download the logs with the cost free Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer. Daily Office 365 license statistics: To see the real usage of licenses per OU and per day, week, month or year, D365 stores daily data from now on. This data will be available for further usage. More Automation: We got a lot of feedback about implementing custom actions in D365, for example setting specific user properties, assigning custom licenses for specific users, setting Skype for Business policies for users in OU’s and so on. To avoid a cost intensive customization we decided to go another way: We are implementing scripts (like “Macros”) with a powerful editor with intellisense that can execute… PowerShell! Yes, you read correctly. D365 will support PowerShell commands and whole scripts for fulfilling custom tasks in Office 365! We are currently developing and testing and plan to update D365 with this module in mid to late October. The working title for this feature is “D365 Automation”. Any other suggestions? More: Improvements in the Sync operation, fixes and some more features… You see there are cool features coming to Delegate365 version 6. Stay tuned! ...