As the CEO of an SMB I recognize that one of our greatest assets is tapping the knowledge of our employees.  On any given day each employee may deal with up to 15-20 individual customers, 3-5 vendors, 10-15 fellow employees, and 3-5 strategic partners.  That’s as many as 540 unique interactions per day!  Sound familiar?  When I talk to other CEOs this is not an uncommon problem – and if you think that just one or two of these interactions produce some bit of information that would be useful for the entire team – there’s a lot of data that would be useful for the entire team to leverage. 

We are already users of the Gazelles system for daily huddles to allow for a complete alignment, daily, in our business – but we were still lacking the ability to capture data in a format that the entire team could leverage, could be easily updated, and could be available on any device.  Who wouldn’t want that? 

Our original strategy was an ‘employee operational manual’ that was produced in Word.  It was just clunky – there was confusion on where the latest copy was and it was difficult to keep it updated.  After struggling with this – we decided to use a SharePoint Wiki.  You already know what Wikipedia is all about – crowd sourced content that is searchable and available online.  SharePoint gives you the exact same functionality in your business. 

Here’s an example:

We wanted to standardize, as much as possible, our backup process for our customers.  We also wanted to make it so that any new hire could easily follow the instructions and know the PTG way for completing this task.  (You can insert any process here – think about how you capture leads,sales orders, or accounts receivable.)  Of course, the vendor has some documentation – but there were three problems there: 1) their process didn’t match ours exactly, 2) a new hire might not know where to find the vendor’s document, and 3) the vendor might move the document if they re-worked their internal website.  Also, the software interface might change from version to version making any documentation that we created in Word outdated.

So – we created a Wiki that every employee has access to AND every employee has rights to modify and create new pages.  We can even drop in screenshots (and change them on the fly), link to other pages (inside and outside our firewall), and search on the content of the pages (so you can easily find data even if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for).  What’s even better?  Since SharePoint Online is platform agnostic – we can get to the data on a laptop, Mac, iPad, Windows Phone, iPhone – from anywhere. 

We have been using the Wiki for about 3 months inside our business and it has changed the way our employees interact.  Someone might ask a question during our huddle and another employee will say: “It’s in SharePoint” or “I just updated the Wiki with the new process for getting that done”.

Our employees are now empowered with data at their fingertips and are actively involved in the data sharing process.  What CEO wouldn’t want that?

It’s no secret that we (PTG) are big fans of Microsoft’s Cloud offering, Office 365.  It brings together really awesome technology on a single platform – SharePoint Online for collaboration, Lync for real-time messaging with employees and partners, and Exchange for enterprise class messaging, calendaring, and tasks. Clearly we are a little biased as a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion (Microsoft’s top designation for Cloud partners) and Cloud Accelerate Partner – but I decided to write a series of blog posts on why I love Office 365 as a CEO of any small business – not necessarily a technology company.  What most folks don’t know about me is that I am really not a techie – and that’s the position I will take in these posts.  How does Office 365, with the tools that I use everyday, help me get my job done as the CEO? 

The tools that I use are nothing fancy – Apple iPad 2 (cellular and WiFi enabled), Windows HTC Trophy Phone (Verizon), a Dell Latitude, and the Office 365 E3 Plan – tools that every CEO has in his/her toolkit.  (Note: I previously used an Apple iPhone and this process worked well on that platform as well.  I recognize that I am in the minority when it comes to the Windows Phone, but I dropped my iPhone at Disney World and it destroyed the screen.  But, the Windows Phone does rock.)

Stay tuned to this blog over the course of the next few weeks as I post things.  There isn’t any real structure here – I am just posting my thoughts and experiences as they come to me.

If you have a specific question about how you might be able to leverage Office 365 – send me an email direct at info at office365migrations.com and I will be glad to address any specific use cases as I can!

Installing Lync for Mac on Office 365

1) Log into https://portal.microsoftonline.com using your Office 365 credentials.

2) After you have logged in, click on this link: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/download/default.aspx and download Lync for Mac 2011 (#2 on this webpage).

3) Download Lync to your Mac and then click on the blue L to begin the install.

4) Accept all of the defaults as you continue through the install.

5) You may get prompted for Lync to become your default for making telephone calls and conferences. Accept these prompts.

6) At the Lync for Mac application page, you in your Office 365 credentials (it’s your email) then click Advanced.

7) Change the button to manual configuration and enter in the information as outlined below. Press ‘Ok’ and then sign in on the next page.

We often get the question: “How can we make sure that our attendees can quickly get into our Lync sessions so that we don’t spend the first 15 minutes of any session having them download ‘stuff’?”

When you send your attendees a Lync invite there is a hyperlink in their meeting that says “First Online Meeting”? This will take the users to a page where they can prepare for the meeting – but the key is the third link that says “meeting readiness”.

Have your attendees click this link prior to the meeting and the page will make sure they have the appropriate items installed (based on their OS type and level of administrative privileges).

Here is the link.

If you are using a SharePoint Online Document Center (you are using one to help manage documents, right?) – you may upload several documents at once.  If you have turned on force check out – all of these documents will be uploaded but they will be left in a checked out state.  That’s not good if someone else wants to edit them.

You can easily check them all back in with just a few clicks.

1) Go to your document center and click the checkboxes beside the documents you wish to check in.

2) Go to the Documents portion of the ribbon and look for ‘Check In’.

3) Click ‘Check In’.

We had a new Office 365 user who wanted to delete a document from a document library and wasn’t sure how to do it.

To delete a document from a library – hover your mouse over the file (and a little to the right) and the down arrow will appear. Click the down arrow and the property dialog box will appear with your options, then choose ‘delete’.

We recently had a customer that was having a hard time updating his time zone for Exchange Online in Office 365.  Here are the instructions on how to set this up. 

1. Log into Outlook Web Access

2. At Top Right click on “Options”

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4. Then choose “See All Options” which will take you to a different screen

5. On the left hand side click “Settings”

6. Then click the icon which says “Regional”

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8. Then choose your time zone the drop down and save.

We were recently engaged by a large construction and engineering firm to help with ‘SharePoint Training’.  I put that into quotes because the organization had a general idea of what they thought they wanted us to do.  Their approach: come in and ‘train us on SharePoint’.

The problem: they had no idea what they really wanted to accomplish.

We could have very easily just sold the engagement and done ‘training’ but it would have set the organization up to fail. We follow a very specific implementation methodology when it comes to SharePoint:

Step 1: Meet with the Core Team and go through the functionality in SharePoint.

Step 2: Identify the areas of functionality where the quickest wins can be recognized (Document Libraries are always a good start).  Map those areas of functionality to the functional silos (lines of business) of the business (sales/marketing, HR, legal, finance, executive team).

Step 3: Meet individually with the subject matter experts for the previously defined lines of business.  Design the SharePoint platform to meet those requirements.

Step 4: Customize the SharePoint environment to match the functional requirements of each line of business.  These include custom lists, SharePoint workflow implementations, integration with 3rd party applications, KPI creation.

Step 5: Meet with each line of business owner and review our customizations.  Make modifications as needed.

Step 6: Finalize the SharePoint training documentation.  Present to the executive team.  Finalize SharePoint roll out and complete end user training – including ‘cheat sheets’ for functional areas.

If we can help you with your Office 365 or SharePoint roll out – contact us today!

We recently worked with an Office365 client who had a ton of contacts.  They wanted us to help them create contact lists in Office 365 for each ‘type’ of contact so that people could easily track down the person they were looking for.

The problem with this approach was that it would:

A) Create lots of lists of contacts in SharePoint (one for each type)

B) Leave it up to the user to determine which type of contact the person is prior to creating a new contact – which could lead to them choosing the wrong type and placing them in the wrong list, thus slowing down the collaboration process (isn’t that why you use SharePoint?)

Instead – we used one contact list in SharePoint Online and then added a custom column that included their three different types of contacts (vendor, client, contractor).  We also modified the ‘new’ form so that the type would always be at the top. 

We then created three views that filtered the contacts based on their type. 

Then the client needed the ability to quickly upload the new contacts.  The pages from their training manual on how to do this are below.

Choose Allow.

Choose Yes.

Go back to SharePoint list, then Click List.  Then choose datasheet view.

Then change the contact type to the preferred contact type (vendor, contractor or client).  It’s easiest to do this in datasheet view because you can make a bunch of changes at once.

Finally – you can modify what you are looking at by choosing ‘List’ and changing the view.

If you want to use some of the advanced features of SharePoint Online or Exchange Online – it’s important that you have the right organization hierarchy set up. This isn’t applicable to a 3-10 person business – but to the upper end of SMBs, this is very applicable….especially if you want to use some of our custom workflows for Exchange Online.

To set up your organizational hierarchy in Office 365 – log in as the administrator for your Office 365 account and then choose ‘Manage’ for Exchange Online.

Then highlight the person’s name that you want to manage and choose details.

Navigate down to Organization and then browse out to their manager.