Windows 10 How To: Placing two Windows side by side using short cut keys…

Closer Look at Microsoft's upcoming Whiteboard app

This is an upcoming app that is targeted to the Education Market. Very simple UI with lots of easy to understand capabilities. Has built-in shape recognition. Automated graph creation by writing out the equation. You can insert images from Bing. You can then share the white board with other people easily. You can also share the same board with off-site individuals as well for collaboration.

Microsoft originally introduced this in May 2017. It was designed to work with Surface devices and provides two-way inking for windows 10. Currently in private preview for Surface Hub devices, the new whiteboard includes collaborative inking, geometry recognition, table conversion, and automatic table shading. It’s really designed to let people share ink across multiple devices, and will be available on all Surface devices later this year.

*Note that collaboration features require Office 365 business accounts with OneDrive for Business, and are only available on Surface Hubs at this time.

No information that I can find when it will be available for other Surface devices or on Windows 10 generally.

Updates to Windows as a Service Model

If you wanted to know how Microsoft is planning on keeping your copy of Windows 10 updated with security and bug fixes and new feature update builds.

NakedSecurity:Privacy dust-up as Roomba maker mulls selling maps of users’ homes

Another example of how embracing technology and automation can come back and bite you! The more technology that has reach back to the manufacturer you have in your home, the more data that they will be able to acquire about your habits, likes and dislikes and your infrastructure. So… you can either continue to acquire the products that seem to make your life easier and/or more enjoyable or you can run back to your cave and pull the rock back in front of your door. Is there a happy medium? I don’t think so! I look at the number of services and devices that I use and it has become enormous.

Take a look at this article to give you another insight into what companies like iRobot have about you and your environment and how it could be used as a commodity sale to other companies.

SharePoint Public Website

If you are or were thinking of using the Office 365 SharePoint Public Website realize that it will soon be disappearing. It is a pity since it gave you a quick website that you could add content to that your clients could visit. It was probably not often used since it did not utilize the domain name of your choice right out of the box. Of course this can be done but it wasn’t done without getting into the system and your domain hosting service to make the changes.

But of course this is all mute now since Microsoft is cancelling this service. The SharePoint Online Public Websites feature is primarily used by a small percentage of our Office 365 customers for their own external-facing websites. Office 365 customers who currently use the SharePoint Online Public Website feature will continue to have access to the feature for a minimum of two years after the changeover date of March 9, 2015.

As of February 2017, customers have had the ability in the SharePoint Admin Center to postpone the removal of their SharePoint Online public website, which would allow them to continue to use the site through March 31, 2018. Customers will continue to have the option of subscribing to third-party solutions for public website functionality. To postpone the site deletion through March 31, 2018, follow these steps:

1. Select Admin from the App Launcher. 
2. Select Admin Centers.
3. Select SharePoint.
4. Select Settings.
5. Scroll to Postpone deletion of SharePoint Online public websites.
6. Select the I’d like to keep my public website until March 31, 2018 option.

Beginning May 1, 2017, anonymous access for existing sites will no longer be available. If customers need more time to move their public website, they have a one-time postponement option for up to one year (March 31, 2018). Customers must select the postpone option by May 1, 2017.

On September 1, 2017, when Microsoft deletes the public site collection in SharePoint Online, customers will no longer have access to the content, images, pages, or any other files that reside on their public website. Before September 1, 2017, customers should make a backup copy of all their public website content, images, pages, and files, so they don’t lose them permanently.

On March 31, 2018, Microsoft will delete all public sites that have been postponed.

Why is Microsoft making this change?

As part of the evolution of the Office 365 service, we periodically evaluate the capabilities of the service to make sure that we’re delivering the utmost value to customers. After careful consideration, we concluded that for public websites, Office 365 customers would be better served by third-party providers whose core competency is public websites. Therefore, we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the SharePoint Online Public Website feature so that we can focus our efforts and investments on delivering capabilities in Office 365 that will bring more value to our customers.

New feature: Microsoft Forms Preview

MC106358 - Published On : July 11, 2017

Microsoft Forms is a simple and lightweight app for creating polls, surveys, and quizzes that lets your users easily gather customer feedback, measure satisfaction, learn what employees think, organize team events, and more. It works on any web browser, and includes features such as themes, logo and image support, real time responses, automatic charts, question branching, and support for collaboration. With this Preview, we will also be upgrading the Excel Survey feature, which will be renamed “Forms for Excel”. This update comes with a modern experience powered by Microsoft Forms to make it simple and easy to collect information into Excel. It can now be used without changing the organization’s sharing settings in OneDrive. The Preview comes with the quality, compliance, and security you’ve come to expect from Office 365. We have already enabled Microsoft Forms Preview for all First Release customers configured for entire organization, in June. - Allow users who access forms.office.com directly to create and share Forms (completed) - Enable app launcher tile for licensed users of Forms (completed) - Upgrade Excel Survey with Forms-powered “Forms for Excel” feature (completed) We will begin rolling out to the rest of Office 365, starting the second half of July, and the roll out will be completed by September. We have enabled Microsoft Forms settings in admin portal, so you could pre-configure Microsoft Forms for your employees before the roll out. There is no change on Microsoft Forms for education customers, as it has been available since August 2016. This message is associated with Office 365 Roadmap ID 16254.

How does this affect You?

With this release, administrators can now assign or remove Microsoft Forms licenses to employees on a per user basis. Removing the license from a user will prevent the user from creating forms in Microsoft Forms, but they can still respond to forms created by others. By default, Microsoft Forms is enabled for your organization.

New feature: Column creation in modern SharePoint lists and libraries

MC110033  -  Published On : July 18, 2017

Microsoft is improving the column creation experience in modern SharePoint Online lists and libraries. You’ll begin seeing this new feature in the coming days.

How does this affect you?

Microsoft is adding the ability to create and configure the following column types by clicking the "+" icon that next to the column headers in modern lists and libraries:

• Number
• Yes/No
• Person
• Choice
• Hyperlink
• Picture
• Single line of text
• Multiple lines of text

They will be rolling this out in late July, and the rollout will be completed in the next few months.

Microsoft Inspire 2017

I know that I am a couple of weeks late reporting on this conference but there were a lot of interesting things announced and discussions on how to help Partners like ourselves to work with our customers in understanding the Microsoft Cloud World and how we can help you to understand what is available and how to use it.

From some of the sessions that I watched I have attained some ideas of what I want to do on this blog. I enjoy sharing some of the things that I find useful to me with you, but I need to get back into the exploration of what is available to you through your subscriptions to the different products that we support. So, you can expect a little more how to instead of just straight reporting on subjects that I have found interesting.

Hopefully that will make this site more useful and interesting to all of you that are following it.