OneNote is a great audit tool

When you’re in meetings with customers and partners why not offer to take the notes on your tablet, slate or laptop and then when the meeting is done simply save the notes as a PDF to create a simple, (almost) non editable version of the notes that you can share with colleagues, customers and partners.  This is especially useful if you hook up your device to a projector (using duplicate screen mode) and use your tablet as an electronic whiteboard. 

To export your results to PDF, choose “File”, “Save As” and then “PDF”. When the save dialog is displayed you can choose to save selected pages, the current section or even the whole notebook. If you don’t want the PDF step you can share your notes even more quickly by using the Share tab and selecting the “E-mail Page” button to send the page as a picture. The “audit” part comes in because both you and the customer has a permanent copy of the notes.

For collaborating with colleagues, an even better option is to use shared notebooks. Using SharePoint 2010 (e.g. your MySite) you can create shared notebooks which are synchronised between team members and always kept up to date.   This even works in File Shares!

This is great for going to a meeting, taking notes and then automatically having them shared with your extended account teams.

To share a notebook that already exists go into “File”, “Share” and then choose the SharePoint server (“Network” option) server where you want to store it. When you’ve done this make sure that the location you stored the notebook has the correct permissions for your colleagues. To share a new notebook on SharePoint, go into “File”, “New” and select “Network” and choose the SharePoint.

Did you know you can create a meeting note directly from an Outlook Appointment, and that note will contain the date, time, location and names of all the attendees of the Outlook item?

Just go into the appointment in Outlook and you’ll see a nice big OneNote icon – click that and the rest is obvious.  Actually, every Office application has a OneNote button, even Lync for taking notes related to a call or instant message.

Using and creating templates

One way of gettng better organised might be to use a common template for meeting notes – if you click on the down-arrow next to the New Page command in the sidebar, you’ll see available templates and a link allowing you to set up new templates or find others online.

Some templates on microsoft.com.

The three main goals of this site are to:

1. 1. Inspire and educate business users to do more with SharePoint through helpful and engaging content.
2. 2. Help you drive adoption through customisable adoption kits that Collaboration service owners and trainers can use with business users.
3. 3. Take business users from what can I do to show me how while measuring video views, click through, and adoption kit downloads.

The Site Features:

• 10- 1 minute scenario focused webisodes
• 10- 3-5 minute scenario focused how to videos
• 45 quick reference cards
• 24 tips and tricks
• Real end user stories

Through conversations with customers we learned that there was a strong demand for adoption kits, with each customer wanting something slightly different then the next. To make it as easy as possible to drive adoption we have also created two different yet highly customisable options.

• Option A includes a lunch themed SharePoint site template and promotional materials for organisations looking for an engaging way to share the content on the website without sending their users outside the firewall. Also on this site users will  be able to interact with blogs, wikis, and discussion boards on topics centred around lunch.
• Option B is a standalone kit, which includes all of the training content on the site, as well as  promotional material to drive users to the location the customer has chosen.

The Adoption Kits Include:

• Lunch Themed SharePoint Site Template (Option A)
• All content featured on the site
• Adoption White Paper
• Lunch themed and stand alone:
• Table tent templates
• Email templates
• Poster templates

AND… by the way we are always looking for new customer stories to include on the site. If you think you have a compelling story you want to share with the world…. Let me know!

Also – another tidbit I found interesting was a YouTube Series of ~1 minute videos organised by Christian Buckley at Axceler that asks some of the SharePoint Experts around the world “What is The One Thing you need to know about SharePoint”?

For example – here is the one from Jeremy Thake: 

Jeremy Thake - co-founder of nothingbutsharepoint.com

It’s a new type of Help, and a new way to deliver it. The screensaver shows short 60-90 second videos provide tips, tricks, and timesavers for Office 2010.

The Getting Started with Office 2010 Screensaver downloads a new tip every day and displays it when you’re not using your PC. And if a particular tip piques your curiosity, simply click to learn more.

Easy to ignore, yet hard to overlook

The quest to help you get started with new software isn’t new. Remember those “tip of the day” dialogs that popped up whenever you started a program? Weren’t they annoying? Didn’t you close them almost instantly? The problem was that they interrupted you when you were trying to get work done. But what if there was something that wasn’t intrusive—something that was easy to ignore and yet easy to stay glued to. The cool thing about screensavers is that they’re easy to dismiss when you have something to do, but they’re there waiting for you when you don’t.

Download the Screensaver today from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d9966a8-ef43-4fe0-80a4-29fa209a7d62

(NOTE: You’ll need Windows 7 for this screensaver)

A couple of stand out stats and points CommBank mention in the video:

• 32,000  users
• Deployed in a couple of weeks
• No compatibility or stability issues – it just worked
• Training is self driven – intuitive enough to be self taught
• 60% of users adopted within 24 hours of deployment
• External federation for communication and collaboration with partners
• A hearing impaired employee discovered she can now use Video to read lips of remote people she is working with

Check it out here at this friendly URL:  http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Lync-Server/Commonwealth-Bank-of-Australia/CBA-deployed-Microsoft-Lync-Server-2010-and-experienced-fastest-take-up-of-any-product-they-ve-ever-deployed-across-the-business-with-60-adoption-rate-within-24-hours/4000009901

The team recently announced that Ribbon Hero 2 is available for download.  Ribbon Hero 2 is a game, yes a game, that embeds into Office 2010 and Office 2007 for learning.

It’s quite a novel approach to training – by having you actually use the features in Office wrapped up in an online adventure.

I was expecting a minor change from Ribbon Hero 1.  Was I surprised when it was completely changed, and all for the better.  In this version it is really a game that takes you through different Office applications with tasks and actions – following the adventures of Clippy as he travels through time in his time machine. 

It really is a lot of fun and includes everything a good game should:  Clippy, Comic Strips, Colourful graphics, Surprise animations, multiple levels, time travel, upside-down clippy, space ships, greed gods, bows and arrows, all with Office training happening.

Download it for Office 2007 or Office 2010 at www.ribbonhero.com    (Yes, it’s free)

I think this could change the way people think about Office Training, and training in general.  Have fun!

See below for screen shots of some of the action:

Clippy in Ancient Egypt

Helping the Pharaoh with his To Do List in OneNote:

Creating an animation to have the Knight  charge at the Dragon in PowerPoint:

Successfully changing the Knights Square Table to a Round Table

These activities normally are to:

• help the Internal Communications team build a communications plan prior to, during, and after Office deployment.
• help the Learning and Development team plan all the resources for help, training, coaching for the users; and
• promote Internal Office Buzz days where the highlights of Office 2010 are shown to end users to help them excited or enthused about the change

Sometimes customers want to have “give aways” or prize draws for attendees – branded with Office 2010.  Microsoft runs a Branded Merchandise Store – allowing you to purchase branded merchandise for Office 2010, SharePoint, Visio, Project and Lync!

Some classic items are Bags, USB drives, Golf Balls, Shirts, Hats, Water Bottles, Notebooks etc.

Happy shopping!

Sprint saves over $9.3Million annually with their solution.

See their Video Case study and Business Success story at:  http://www.microsoft.com/business/success/?StoryID=147 

How are they saving money?

1) They are replacing their 489 PBX’s with software driven voice capabilites.

2) They are unifying 18 voice messaging systems with Microsoft Unified Messaging

3) They are using less expensive IP Phones and headsets, and giving users more choice on the device they can use

4) Using RoundTable devices (now marketed as the Polycom CX5000) for Boardroom Video Conferencing

5) Reduction in local carrier charges

6) Reduction in Electricity

7) Optimized Office space – more flexible working allows for more people per floor. Through a variety of programs, enabled by IT, Sprint claims they have reduced floor space by 1 million square feet.

Download the complete Case Study document –> Download Case Study

For those organisations that are about to deploy Microsoft Lync for their corporate Presence, Instant Messaging, Audio, Video and Web Conferencing interface we have released a packaged kit to assist you with Lync End User Training and Adoption.

This material is fantastic for Learning & Development, IT, or Internal Communications teams to leverage in their communications and readiness plans.   You can download the single .zip file (65MB) of all content from the Lync link below.

This download contains a variety of user education and training resources for including What's New articles and videos, Quick Start Guides, Work Smart Guides, Short Videos, and Training PowerPoint Presentations.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=f01a17e2-bec0-42c7-b1ce-fd4842ab1c91

If you don’t know what Microsoft Lync is…. Bill Gates has a nice summary of how it builds on his vision of using software to improve the way people communicate.

The content is a 10 minute video that has the two Microsoft SharePoint Operations  leads (Sam Crewdson and Nate Bruneau) describe the steps on how we upgraded our internal SharePoint 2007 farm to  SharePoint 2010.

In particular, they describe their IT upgrade philosophies, and discuss their Pain Points found and Lessons learned, and they go into a detail around how to enforce 5 principles they believe are important during the upgrade:

1. Detect issues early
2. Communication Plan - Keep site administrators informed
3. Perform the upgrade with no data loss
4. Minimise down time during the upgrade
5. Minimise impact to end users

Find the video here:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/gg552996 

Nice work guys, and thanks for sharing!

In 2008 I released guidance on how to use Outlook 2007 features to prioritise and categorise a large number of emails.  The details were shared in my blog here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ianpal/archive/2008/06/03/email-task-and-time-management-with-pifem.aspx

I’ve now updated the guidance and materials for Outlook 2010.  The concept is still fundamentally the same, but there is new features in Outlook 2010 to make the management of information overload in your inbox even easier.

I’ve published the new PIFEM 2010 overview and setup instructions in an interactive OneNote Notebook. 

NOTE:  I’ve also also provided a static non-interactive PDF file if needed… but your preferred preferred way to read the material is in OneNote.

These OneNote and PDF files are shared in my Windows Live Skydrive at http://sdrv.ms/VHGeF7

Cheers
Ian