The Office Online team is pleased to release our latest update to Office Online Server (OOS). OOS empowers organizations to view, edit, and create documents in the browser with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote from their own datacenter. Please verify that you have the latest version of the OOS release to ensure the best experience.
The November 2017 update of OOS includes the following improvements:
- Improved booting performance in PowerPoint Online editing scenarios
- Enhanced transitions in PowerPoint Online
- Improved Find functionality in Excel Online
- Document format conversion from xls to xlsx supported in Excel Online
- Emoji support in Word Online
- Increased table capabilities in Word Online
- Insert image from host in Word Online
- Doubled the time limit for audio recordings in OneNote Online
- Accessibility & usability improvements across all applications
- Many more improvements + bug fixes across all applications
How do I get OOS/download the update?
We encourage OOS customers to download the November 2017 release, as only the latest version will be supported with bug fixes and security patches available from the Microsoft Updates Download Center. You must uninstall the previous version of OOS to install this release.
With the exception of those who have access through the Open Program, Volume Licensing customers with a Volume Licensing account can download at no cost and will have view-only functionality which includes PowerPoint sharing in Skype for Business. Customers that require document creation, edit and save functionality in OOS need to have an on-premises Office Suite license with Software Assurance or an Office 365 ProPlus subscription. To download the latest update of OOS, please proceed to the Volume License Servicing Center. Office Online Server is a component of Office; therefore, it will be shown under each of the Office product pages including Office Standard 2016, Office Professional Plus 2016, and Office 2016 for Mac Standard. For more information on licensing requirements, please refer to our product terms.
For customers whose licenses qualify for OOS, but cannot obtain OOS through the Volume Licensing Services Center, the following actions are possible:
This blog series is written by Cyril Belikoff, Senior Director of Office Marketing
This is the fourth and final post from our blog series on the four success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption.
Part 1: Enable your business stakeholders with a successful Microsoft 365 adoption
Part 2: Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption
Part 3: Identify business needs and prioritize Microsoft 365 scenarios
In this blog post I will focus on the last two success factors – Awareness and Training, outlining best practices and available resources.
Utilizing a combination of internal communication campaigns and training to promote awareness and ensure end user readiness is crucial in overcoming the typical apathy that awaits new technology rollouts. Awareness and training really do have a big impact. According to research, high usage Office 365 customers were more likely to have implemented awareness and training activities as part of their adoption plan when compared to customers with lower usage.
Setting the stage for effective awareness and training
We are all too familiar with how hard it is to get people to change. Let’s face it, most people approach change from a selfish perspective. Therefore, it’s important your communication and training efforts are positioned in the context of what your end users care about most – what’s in it for them. Also, your training must go beyond the procedural “how-to” information for performing tasks with Microsoft 365. Let your end users know why the change is happening and what’s in it for them. An effective way of doing this is to tailor your communications and training around the scenarios you identified and prioritized earlier in your planning efforts.
Like any change, it’s important to reinforce it to ensure end users sustain their adoption of Microsoft 365 and the new culture of work it brings. Don’t think of your awareness and training execution as a one-time event, rather it should cover pre-launch, launch, and post-launch.
Create internal awareness and excitement
To drive sustained adoption, users must be aware of and excited for Microsoft 365. This means doing internal communications to promote Office 365 and engagement events. Use the resources we’ve made available, including email, poster, and tips and tricks templates you can customize for your rollout. Have a senior leader in the business be the face of your awareness campaign to validate the importance of the organization adopting Microsoft 365 and getting everyone onboard.
“We knew we had to be crystal clear with employees about how Office 365 would make their lives easier and help them do their jobs better. So, we branded it as four things: Work Anywhere, Work Anytime You Like, Work Together, and Work on Any Device.”
Joe Kamara
Nec Group, Lead Change Manager
Enable end users to be successful with Microsoft 365
Given the diversity of people in any organization you’ll likely have multiple audiences to serve with your training program. In preparing your plan it’s important to consider:
- What are the different user types in your organization? What is their comfort level with new technology?
- What is their role in the organization? What are some of the tasks they perform?
- Where do users perform these tasks? On a mobile device? In the office using a workstation?
- How might organizational policies be affected by the integration of the new tool set – e.g., sharing documents, storing files, collaborating with external partners, using email attachments?
Training end users should take on multiple forms to accommodate different learning styles, geographical barriers, and any constraints you face. To get started with your training, take advantage of the available resources from Microsoft, including the Office Training Center and Windows 10 Quick Start Guides. Use your champions to help supplement your training plan, they are very effective at helping ready your end users.
Next steps
Now that we’ve reviewed all four of the success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption – Stakeholders, Scenarios, Awareness and Training – your question may be what’s next? It’s time to start planning how you are going to ensure these success factors are in place for your adoption. I’d suggest getting your stakeholders and project team members onboard. Work with Microsoft FastTrack, our customer success service, and a Microsoft partner to build your Success Plan and get further guidance and resources to help you implement these four success factors.
Reach out to us and your peers who are also on this journey by checking out the Drive Adoption community. We look forward to hearing about your Microsoft 365 success story!
This blog series is written by Cyril Belikoff, Senior Director of Office Marketing
This is the third post from our blog series on the four success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption.
Check out the other posts part of this series:
Part 1: Enable your business stakeholders with a successful Microsoft 365 adoption
Part 2: Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption
In this blog post I will focus on the second success factor – Scenarios, and how to identify and prioritize them, while measuring their impact on your organization.
The true measure of success for your Microsoft 365 adoption, like any change or new technology, will be the value realized by your organization from its investment. Your opportunity with Microsoft 365 is to enable the different Lines of Business (LoBs) and departments in your organization to realize important business outcomes. This requires identifying and prioritizing scenarios – which are the different ways people and teams in your organization can use the capabilities of Microsoft 365 to achieve their goals.
Get started with early wins and build on that success
Our most successful customers typically start their journey with more basic scenarios that have universal appeal across the organization:
- Employee Engagement & Communication: Create a sustainable, consistent way for senior leaders to connect with employees, using Yammer as a community to share and engage, and Skype Meeting Broadcast for companywide meetings.
- Bring Campaigns to Market Faster: Enable marketers to collaborate with people inside and outside the organization using Microsoft Teams as their shared workspace for communicating and sharing with team members.
- Increase Sales Productivity and Grow Revenue: Provide sales teams with a centralized hub with Microsoft Teams for sales planning, real time collaboration on proposals and RFPs, and for managing their monthly, quarterly, and annual business reviews.
- Streamline Business Reviews: Help finance move beyond gathering and cleaning data to be able to analyze data with Power BI, and collaborate together on the data in one place with Microsoft Teams.
Once you’ve delivered value with these more basic scenarios, you have more credibility to engage your business stakeholders for custom scenarios that deliver unique value. Think of this value realization motion as a flywheel – score some early wins with cross organization scenarios, and then move on to more ambitious areas of impact for each LoB or department. As you provide more and more impact to the business, more stakeholders will get engaged and the momentum of the flywheel builds and builds.
So, how can you work with your business stakeholders to identify relevant scenarios for their teams to adopt? At it’s most basic level it’s about identifying what the team wants to accomplish, how they can use the technology to accomplish their goal, and what the expected impact of the Scenario is. To help you get started, check out the Microsoft 365 productivity library, where you can discover new scenarios based on your industry and different functional departments.
The IT team leading the Microsoft 365 adoption at Standard Bank – Africa’s largest banking group, has done a great job engaging with the business to identify scenarios that are helping different stakeholders accomplish their goals. Standard Bank dedicated an adoption team within IT to engage with each business unit and functional department to realize unique value with Microsoft 365 in a consistent manner – i) conduct an “art of the possible” session with the team so they can start to envision relevant Microsoft 365 scenarios, ii) workshop scenarios by mapping Microsoft 365 capabilities to the team’s challenges and goals, iii) prototyping and implementing prioritized scenarios, and iv) enabling the business unit to be self-sustainable in their adoption of scenarios and evolving the solutions to suit their needs.
“You don’t need a large team and budget to get going. Dedicate some resources who are passionate about improving the business, who can get in where the work is happening and can assist business users in making the bridge between their day to day challenges and friction points, and the enabling technology that comes with Microsoft 365.
A great resource to help with this is the Microsoft 365 Productivity Library, we’ve used it to help our business discover scenarios and use cases that are relevant to them. Once they see that they can bring different components of the suite together to respond to different needs, they get it.”
Ian Doyle
Standard Bank, IT Executive
To avoid overwhelming end users with too many scenarios at the same time it’s important to prioritize your scenarios based on expected impact and difficulty of implementing. This prioritized list will determine what scenarios get rolled out when.
Measure and share success
To measure the success of your Microsoft 365 rollout, it’s critical to develop a set of criteria to evaluate the different scenarios you and your team have implemented. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you expect will improve based on adopting your scenarios. Evaluate where you are before implementing Microsoft 365 and measure your ongoing progress post implementation. While it’s important to measure and showcase the business value you are providing the organization with your Microsoft 365 implementation, monitoring and reporting on usage helps demonstrate overall adoption levels and areas where improvement is required. The Office 365 adoption content pack is available to gain insights on how your organization is adopting the various services within Office 365.
Success stories are often just as valuable as quantitative measures when demonstrating Microsoft 365 success. Encourage your project team members and champions to identify examples of people and teams using Microsoft 365 to accomplish their goals and everyday tasks. Make sure you share these success stories through Yammer or other internal channels.
Now that you have identified and prioritized your scenarios, it’s time to create internal excitement about the scenarios and ready end users to successfully adopt them. Stay tuned for the next blog post where I will cover the final two success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption – Awareness and Training.
![Part 2: Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption]()
This blog series is written by Cyril Belikoff, Senior Director of Office Marketing
This is the second post from our blog series on how to help your organization accelerate time to value with its Microsoft 365 adoption.
In the initial blog post in this series, I shared our viewpoint on the opportunity Information Technology (IT) teams have with solutions, such as Microsoft 365, to enable business value for their organization and I outlined the four success factors for adopting Microsoft 365.
This blog post will focus on the first success factor – Stakeholders, and their importance in driving the change necessary to realize the full value of Microsoft 365.
Your Microsoft 365 rollout is not just about implementing new technologies, rather it’s part of a broader transformation to achieve the business outcomes that matter most to your organization. For example, many of our customers adopt Microsoft 365 to enable a new culture of work that empowers their employees to be creative and work together, securely. Transforming to this new culture of work requires buy-in from across the organization. There are two stakeholder groups whose participation is critical to getting this buy-in:
- Executive sponsors whose influence can help drive the change required for your organization to achieve its business goals with Microsoft 365
- Champions whose passion for this new way of working will help bring their colleagues along
Executive sponsors
Like any other organizational transformation – enabling a new culture of work by adopting Microsoft 365 requires executive sponsorship. According to a McKinsey & Company survey, transformation projects are more successful when there is a visible executive sponsor.
Executive sponsors play three important roles in your organization’s Microsoft 365 adoption:
- Help articulate the business priorities and envision how Microsoft 365 can be used to solve different business problems
- Lead the transformation and communicate the business benefits to other leaders across the organization
- Actively participate and use the technology to help drive adoption across end users and reinforce desired behaviors.
Champions
Finding passionate end users, who believe that technology can change the way we work to be Microsoft 365 champions, is a great way to scale your adoption efforts. Microsoft 365 champions are your power users and an extension of you and your team, evangelizing to their colleagues how Microsoft 365 can be used to help them in everyday tasks.
There are many ways champions can help their colleagues adopt Microsoft 365, such as running lunch and learn sessions with their team, using Microsoft 365 apps and services for the different collaboration scenarios their team engages in, and welcoming new users to Microsoft 365. It’s important to communicate internally that champions are not IT help desk, rather they are business representatives who can help their team members work in new ways with Microsoft 365.
To build a successful champions community as part of your Microsoft 365 adoption consider the following:
- Recruit champions who are excited about technology and new ways of working, and who are eager to share and help their colleagues
- Ready and support your champions through lightweight Microsoft 365 training and a Yammer group to connect the community to support and encourage each other
- Enable the champions by sharing materials they can reuse in their engagement with colleagues
- Recognize the efforts of your champions
Mott MacDonald, a global engineering, management, and development consultancy, implemented a successful Office 365 champions community. As part of their program, they paired area of practice senior leaders with Office 365 champions. The result was champions learn more about how the business works and senior leaders learn about the technology and how it can be used in their practice area. Also, the mentorship opportunity with a senior leader in the business worked as a great champion recruiting tool. Learn more champion tips and tricks directly from Mott MacDonald in this short video clip.
Help your champions be successful in their role by encouraging them to join our champions program. They will gain access to the latest news and tips, champion-peer networking and sharing, partnerships with Microsoft at premier events and meetups in your industry, and access to Microsoft subject matter experts and unique Office 365 training and content.
Gaining buy-in and participation from key stakeholders, such as executive sponsors and champions, requires educating them about how Microsoft 365 can be used to achieve their goals. In the next blog I will share more about how to work with your business stakeholders to identify and prioritize the Microsoft 365 scenarios that are most relevant to their teams.
![Part 2: Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption]()
After migrating to Office 365, the role of IT is more critical than ever. By driving usage of the services, IT can transform how their organization communicates, collaborates and creatively solves problems, enabling a truly modern workplace. As advocates of technology, IT admins play a crucial role in enabling their people with the best tools to not only improve productivity, but also to accelerate business outcomes.
One of the keys to achieve this goal is to ensure admins understand how every person is using the services in Office 365 so that they can prioritize their efforts, drive targeted end user training and measure the success of their adoption campaigns.
In Office 365, admins have access to a suite of usage reporting tools – including the reporting dashboard in the admin center with 18 reports and Usage Analytics in PowerBI – that enable them to get a deep understanding of how their organization is using Office 365.
Today, we’re introducing a wealth of new usage reporting capabilities that help organizations drive end user adoption.
Track usage of Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork and has become a crucial tool for millions of people. We’re adding two new usage reports to the admin center so you can understand how your users are leveraging this powerful tool.
The Microsoft Teams user activity report gives you a view of the most common activities that your users perform in Microsoft Teams – including how many people engage in team chat, how many communicate via private chat message, and how many participate in calls or meetings. You can see this information both at the tenant level, as well as for each individual user.
The Microsoft Teams app usage report provides you with information about how your users connect to Microsoft Teams, including mobile apps. The report helps admins understand what devices are popular in their organization and how many users work on the go.
We’re also added a new card for Microsoft Teams to the reporting dashboard. The tile gives you an overview of the activity in Microsoft Teams – including the number of active users – so that you can quickly understand how many users are using Microsoft Teams.
Both reports will roll out to customers worldwide in November.
Understand how your organization uses Microsoft Teams
Easily provide access to usage insights
In many organizations, the task to drive usage and adoption of Office 365 is shared by the IT department and non-IT staff such as training managers who do not have access to the admin center. Providing these business stakeholders with access to the usage insights is crucial in enabling them to successfully drive and track adoption.
With this need in mind, we’re introducing a new reports reader role that you can now assign to any user in the Office 365 admin center. This capability will roll out to customers worldwide this week.
This role provides access to the usage reporting dashboard in the admin center, the adoption content pack in PowerBI as well as the data returned by the Microsoft Graph reporting API. In the admin center, a reports reader will be able to access areas relevant to usage and adoption only – for example, a user with this role cannot configure settings or access the product specific admin centers. The reports reader role UI is not available yet in Azure Active Directory but will come soon.
A reports reader will see a reduced homepage and navigation menu
Visualize and analyze usage in PowerBI with Office 365 Usage Analytics
Office 365 Usage Analytics – currently available as preview as Office 365 Adoption Content Pack in PowerBI – combines the intelligence of the usage reports with the interactive analysis capabilities of Power BI, providing a wealth of usage and adoption insights.
At the beginning of 2018, the content pack will be renamed to Usage Analytics and will reach general availability with an updated version that will include new metrics on teamwork and collaboration, usage data for Microsoft Teams, Yammer Groups and Office 365 Groups, and more.
Visualize and analyze usage with Office 365 Usage Analytics in PowerBI
A new “Social Collaboration” area will provide you insights about how people work in teams, and especially how they leverage Microsoft Teams to do so.
All SharePoint reports will be enhanced with activity information from all site types (in addition to groups and team sites) and additional site activity information (page views: number of pages viewed in a site and number of unique pages visited in a site).
Analyze usage of Microsoft Teams with Office 365 Usage Analytics
Microsoft Graph Reporting APIs reach general availability
The Microsoft Graph reporting APIs enable customers to access the data provided in the Office 365 usage reports. To assure that you can monitor your IT services in one unified place, the APIs complement the existing usage reports by allowing organizations and independent software vendors to incorporate the Office 365 activity data into their existing reporting solutions.
In October, the reporting APIs will reach general availability service.
In November, the currently available Office 365 reporting web services will be retired and will not be supported anymore. Please see the full list of deprecated APIs.
We will also be providing a new beta endpoint that will return json data object with full ODATA support. The new endpoint will be fully integrated into the Microsoft Graph SDK. Learn more
More to come
In the coming months, we will continue to further improve the Office 365 usage reporting experience to provide you with a complete picture of how your organization is using Office 365. We’re currently working on the following concepts:
Usage Score – Insights by Scenario and Maturity Level
Office 365 is a suite of products providing a variety of services that together enable modern workplace scenarios such as real-time co-authoring, real-time group chat or working from anywhere. People get the most value out of Office 365 when they take advantage of the full set of capabilities of the service.
In the new modern workplace, we have seen IT concentrating heavily on how to help users use technology effectively for desired business outcomes. To enable IT organizations to better understand the value that Office 365 is providing to their users, we’re introducing Usage Score:
Insights by Scenario and Maturity Level – Usage Score analyzes how well your organization is using the various Office 365 service and provides you with usage insights for scenarios such as document collaboration, team work, meetings, mobility, and data protection. For each scenario, you will receive a score that determines your maturity level enabling you to quickly understand where your organization is on their digital transformation journey. Detailed information will help you understand how your organization could leverage Office 365 even better to accomplish your goals.
Usage Score – Usage insights by scenario
Recommendations to take action – To help you maximize the value you’re getting out of Office 365, Usage Score provides you with personalized and contextual recommendations on how to improve your score – such as changing a configuration setting or starting a targeted adoption campaign. In addition, Usage Score will make it easy for you to take targeted action. If the recommendation is to drive an adoption campaign via email, you will be able to access email templates and launch a targeted email campaign to the right users directly from the admin center.
Usage Score will become available in 2018.
Easily take action to improve your score
Advanced Usage Analytics
Advanced Usage Analytics enables you to access more granular usage data enabling your organization to perform advanced analytics on your organization’s Office 365 usage data.
- Leverage a scalable and extensible solution template to transmit the Office 365 usage dataset into your Azure datastore
- Dynamically join usage data with complete user metadata from Azure Active Directory
- Bring your own user metadata – i.e. as a csv file – to enrich the dataset with your organization’s context or any other LOB data
- Stand up an end-to-end solution in minutes including data extraction, Azure SQL, Azure Analysis Services (optional), and Power BI reports
- Access usage data at the granularity of your choice such as daily, weekly, or monthly.
Putting the reports in action
The Microsoft 365 user adoption guide provides you a plan to leverage the Office 365 usage repots to meet your goal of driving end user adoption. This guidance is available as part of Microsoft FastTrack customer success service to help you realize value faster. FastTrack can help get started or extend your use of your services, including helping you with adoption planning resources and services.
Let us know what you think!
Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower right corner in the admin center. We’d also love to hear your feedback on the new concept that we’re working on! Please leaves us a comment on this blog post to let us know what you think.
We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure the Office 365 reporting experience meets your needs.
– Anne Michels, @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 Marketing team
