Kurt Shintaku's Blog

The Office “dual use rights” policy will be retired as of August 1, 2019. The “dual use rights” policy provides Microsoft 365 customers with the ability to use a perpetual installation of Office (aka Office Professional Plus – the static .MSI version, in the case of Office 2016) in lieu of Office 365 ProPlus if they qualify for the “From SA” SKU.

From the announcement:

Beginning August 1, 2019, new and renewing agreements that include the “From SA” version of Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 will no longer have rights to deploy the perpetual Office client. Customers with active Enterprise Agreements will not be impacted by these changes until their current agreement expires. There are no changes to the use rights of Productivity Servers or Productivity Server CALs that are programmatically included for all Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 customers.

Read more about this retirement here:

• Updates to Microsoft 365 Licensing
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Licensing/news/microsoft365-licensing-update

We are happy to announce the addition of a new Power BI template, Manager Impact, for Office 365 Workplace Analytics. This template shows trends of manager behavior – how managers interact with their teams – within your organization.

Learn about the Manager Impact Power BI template in Workplace Analytics in this blog post here:

• Workplace Analytics – October 2018: Meeting costs, Manager impact, and more
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Analytics-Blog/Workplace-Analytics-October-2018-Meeting-costs-Manager-impact/ba-p/275910

PAST UPDATES FOR WORKPLACE ANALYTICS 
For past monthly updates on Workplace Analytics, visit the Office 365 Analytics blog:

• New Workplace Analytics Feature Releases – May 2018
• New Workplace Analytics Feature Releases – April 2018
• Workplace Analytics – June 2018: New metrics and person-to-group queries
• Workplace Analytics – July 2018: New meeting metrics and UI design
• Workplace Analytics – August 2018: New custom meeting metrics, space planning, and more
• Workplace Analytics – September 2018: Teamwork solution, Admin onboarding, and more
• Workplace Analytics – October 2018: Meeting costs, Manager impact, and more
• Workplace Analytics – November 2018: Meeting exclusion rules

For documentation for Workplace Analytics, visit:

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/workplace-analytics/

Microsoft open sourced WPF, Windows Forms and Windows UI XAML Library at Microsoft Connect(); 2018.

Read more about this announcement here:

• Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI at Microsoft Connect(); 2018
  https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/12/04/announcing-open-source-of-wpf-windows-forms-and-winui-at-microsoft-connect-2018/

For best practices around implementation, lessons learned, recommended approaches, visit our Instructor-led Training site for Microsoft Teams.

This site includes a set of webinars hosted by Microsoft’s Engineering Team for customers to learn more about the main features of Teams, or to discuss hot topics – E.g. Skype to Teams transition. 

Here’s a listing of what’s available now:

• #ThisIsTeams – Microsoft Teams Overview
• Getting started with Teams
• Teams tips & tricks
• Manage your upgrade from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams
• Switch from Skype for Business to Teams: End User Guidance
• Teams for Education – Webinars

Customers can enroll in the webpage at no charge.

• TRAINING: Microsoft Teams – Instructor-led Online Training
  http://aka.ms/TeamsLiveTraining

The Microsoft 365 Blog publishes the newly released services & features available to customers every month in a single blog post.

For review, here’s the 2018 year’s posts/updates: (Yes, September is missing.)

• New in January—enriching teamwork across devices
• New in February—advancing creativity, teamwork, and management in the modern workplace
• New in March—rich data types, intelligent search, and expanded datacenters
• New to Microsoft 365 in April—tools for the modern workplace
• New to Microsoft 365 in May—empowering and securing users
• New to Microsoft 365 in June—streamlining teamwork and security – Microsoft 365 Blog
• New to Microsoft 365 in July—integrating apps and empowering businesses – Microsoft 365 Blog
• New to Microsoft 365 in August—tools to achieve more in the modern workplace – Microsoft 365 Blog
• New to Microsoft 365 in October—tools to create impactful content and help transition to the cloud – Microsoft 365 Blog
• New to Microsoft 365 in November—tools to keep you in your workflow and fine-tune content – Microsoft 365 Blog
• New to Microsoft 365 in December—AI-powered tools to help you create your best work – Microsoft 365 Blog

Registration is open for Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2019.

Meet the engineers behind the tools you use every day and get a sneak peek at what’s new and next.

Microsoft Business Applications Summit
June 10-11, 2019
Georgia World Congress Center
Atlanta, GA

Registration:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/businessapplicationssummit

Check out last year’s sessions available on-demand:

Microsoft Business Applications 2018 included 200+ keynotes and sessions led by the experts behind Dynamics 365, Power BI, PowerApps, Mixed Reality, Microsoft Flow and Excel.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/businessapplicationssummit/sessionsondemand

We’ve announced the “Microsoft Edge Insider Program”, a program that will allow everyone’s voices to be heard as we adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.

Read more about this transition here:

• Microsoft Edge: Making the web better through more open source collaboration
  https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/#t7t1PArxHczeLml7.97

Sign up for the Edge Insider program here:

• Microsoft Edge Insider Program
  https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/

New free Microsoft Teams training for IT Pros is available online as of this week.

The module below is part 1: “Introduction to Upgrade from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams (Upgrade part 1 of 4)” (33:00)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAoqEG777d8

Modules 2-4 are available at:
https://aka.ms/TeamsAcademy

Looking to make the journey to Microsoft Teams? Read this overview of a Teams deployment:

1. Technical and legal assessment in the early stages to identify and define what controls are required to implement Microsoft Teams in your organization.

2. Undertake a network assessment and prepare for the rollout. At this point you can start to create the adoption and change management strategy and key user stories that drive user engagement during and after the rollout.

3. Test these change management and adoption strategies with an IT Pilot.

4. Refine and run a business pilot in one or two business units leveraging these strategies.

5. Refine and leverage the strategy and learnings for a wider rollout.

More details available here:

• DOCS: Overview of a Microsoft Teams deployment
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/deployment-overview?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral

Microsoft 365 usage analytics provides a dashboard in Power BI that offers insights into how users adopt and use Office 365. The dashboard is just a starting point to interact with the usage data. The reports can be customized for more personalized insights.

You can also use the Power BI desktop to further customize your reports by connecting them to other data sources to gain richer insights about your business.

…

For instructions on how to customize the existing PowerBI reports, read the documentation at:

• HOWTO: Customize Microsoft 365 usage analytics reporting
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/usage-analytics/customize-reports?view=o365-worldwide