Huddle and CompanyNet will work to help clients get the most out of their technology investments – building better, and more integrated experiences between the two platforms.

Today, Huddle and CompanyNet are excited to announce a new partnership, designed to help clients of both businesses extend their use of Microsoft Office 365 and Huddle services.

Huddle is a leading cloud-based document collaboration solution that allows teams to build unique workspaces where they can collaborate on documents, manage approval workflows, and oversee team activity and tasks. They already offer deep integrations with Microsoft Office (including Office Online), allowing users to open and co-edit documents directly from Huddle into their Microsoft apps, before natively saving them back and syncing the latest updates to other Huddle users.

Meanwhile, at CompanyNet we’re experts in helping businesses get more out of Office 365. Using principles drawn from change management practice, we introduce employees to new ways of working, leading to measurable improvements in staff productivity and satisfaction. Our services help customers including Tesco Bank, learning disability charity Mencap and the UK Government unlock far greater value from the Office 365 platform, creating higher levels of user adoption, and ultimately driving wider digital transformation.

Together, we will work to help clients get the most out of their technology investments – building better, and more integrated experiences between the Huddle and Office 365 platforms.

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The clocks have gone forward, springtime is here, and it’s time to look at changes to Office 365, SharePoint and Kira with this month’s plain-English round-up.

Microsoft continuously update their Office 365 roadmap with new and changed features. But there’s often so much going on that it’s hard to tell what’s important, or how you use the information.

Each month, we hand-pick key updates to Office 365, ‘modern’ SharePoint, and our own Kira intranet platform. This is part of the ‘evergreen’ Office 365 service we provide to our customers, but if you’re not a customer yet you can still subscribe to the newsletter yourself and follow us on Twitter.

CompanyNet are experts in Office 365 – if you’d like to explore what we can do for your organisation, drop us a line and find out how we can help.

Here are your key updates for April. If you already use our Kira intranet platform, don’t miss the last point for two great new features available now.

1. Changes to the Office 365 experience
2. Control OneDrive sharing within your organisation
3. OneDrive alerts users on deleting many files
4. Share and co-author documents with LinkedIn connections
5. Broadcast Live Events using Microsoft Teams
6. Status change notifications in Microsoft Teams
7. Flow app endpoint in Microsoft Teams
8. Updates to Lists in SharePoint
9. Updates to News in SharePoint
10. Kira 1.8 – two great new features

If you would like to find out more about these changes, or would be interested in help getting more out of Office 365, get in touch with CompanyNet.

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Stay up-to-date with the biggest changes in Office 365, SharePoint and Kira with our monthly plain-English round-up.

Microsoft continuously update their Office 365 roadmap with new and changed features. But there’s often so much going on that it’s hard to tell what’s important, or how you use the information. That’s why we’re launching this, our regular monthly round-up of key updates.

Each month, we’ll hand-pick the most relevant updates to Office 365 – and particularly ‘modern’ SharePoint – and provide useful, actionable insights. We’ll also occasionally include news about updates to Kira, our SharePoint-based intranet platform. This represents just part of the ‘evergreen’ Office 365 service we provide to our customers.

If you’re a CompanyNet customer, we’ll email you personally each time we publish a round-up. If you’re not (yet!), then you can subscribe to the newsletter yourself, follow us on Twitter – or get in touch to see how we can work together.

So, without further ado, here are this month’s key updates:

1. A new menu for changing how your SharePoint site looks
2. Get creative with more page layout options
3. Do more with new components
4. Search across Office 365 from Bing
5. Easily change the design of an existing site
6. Bringing LinkedIn data to Office 365

If you would like to find out more about these changes, or would be interested in help getting more out of Office 365, get in touch with CompanyNet.

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Modern SharePoint sites are about to receive a welcome boost with an abundance of new and improved publishing and user interface features. Here’s what you need to know about the changes.

New features coming to SharePoint include better branding options, a wealth of new web parts, improved layout tools for content creators, and a new ‘mega menu’-style navigation option.

Publishing benefits

As soon as the changes are applied to your organisation’s Office 365 tenant, your intranet will gain a host of new and improved features. Our Kira intranet for SharePoint is already compatible with the new features, so we expect a smooth transition for all our customers.

Here’s what’s coming up:

• More control over page titles – Four different styles of title will be available, plus options for aligning text, adding text above the title, and customising the publishing author and date.
• Page templates – You’ll be able to turn the current page into a template for new pages. Templates created by your organisation’s content authors will be stored in the new ‘Templates Gallery’.
• Section backgrounds – Sections of a page will have the option of background shading, based on the current theme.
• Pick your own thumbnail and description – Up to now, SharePoint has represented links to pages using an auto-generated thumbnail image and description text. You’ll now be able to manually set the image and text that describe your page.

A host of new web parts

As well as these improvements, there’ll be a host of new components available to page creators:

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Exploring the IT industry’s problematic relationship with change management, understanding why effective user adoption is more important than ever in a cloud-ready world, and looking at some methods and techniques available to those enlightened souls who wish to deliberately and positively deliver change and user adoption.

Bananarama and The Fun Boy Three were definitely onto something back in 1982, when they joined forces to record their version of Sy Oliver and Trummy Young’s 1930s classic ditty. What they probably didn’t realise was that almost 40 years later, the song’s central message would be used as a lighthearted device to illustrate effective ways of managing change in the IT industry.

Build it and they will come?

You see, the IT industry has always had a bit of a problem with change management. “Build it and they will come!” has been the prevailing attitude of IT departments through the years.

It’s been fuelled by a misguided belief that users will simply use the solution put in front of them. And all the evidence points to the fact that, unless they simply have to use it, they won’t. Instead, they’ll seek out an alternative route as the ‘path of least resistance’ – and you’ll have a failed implementation on your hands, thanks to poorly-managed user adoption.

Erm, no they won’t

The ‘build it and they will come’ adage betrays a fundamental arrogance which has been prevalent in the industry for decades. It fails to recognise that IT exists to provide a service to the business; that the business contains users of technology, and that users are very adept at knowing what they need, and what they don’t need. IT departments simply haven’t been providing the tools and technologies their user bases demand; if you need any further evidence, witness the rapid growth of ‘shadow IT’.

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Without lots of configuration, search at work has traditionally been a fairly underwhelming experience. All that’s changing with Graph, Microsoft’s ground-up reimagining of how we can find things.

Findability has always been a huge issue for organisations. Whenever we interview people ahead of a new intranet or digital workplace project, underperforming search is often the number one complaint. As people generate more and more information over the course of their working lives, the chances of ‘classic’ search systems returning useful results diminish. To address this, technologists are thinking laterally, redesigning how search works from the ground up.

Having a graph

Office 365 now has more than 100 million active commercial users, who make 50 million hours of Skype calls every day, arrange more than two billion meetings per month and send trillions of emails. With so much happening on their platforms, Microsoft have started treating data about how Windows 10 and Office 365 are being used as an extremely valuable commodity. Internally, that insight is being used to make constant improvements to the apps we use every day. Office 365 is already on a subscription model, and Windows 10 is heading that way; that means Microsoft can push out regular user experience tweaks and feature updates to their software without any action required on the part of the user.

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SharePoint now has limited support for Webhooks. Our Technical Lead, Paul McGonigle, explores how they can be used, and whether they’re worth using.

New features get added to SharePoint Online regularly, and I find it’s worth staying on top of them so we can keep our solutions cutting-edge at CompanyNet. One of the new features I’ve been digging into recently is Webhooks. Webhooks are HTTP callbacks that are automatically triggered when something happens. At the moment, support for Webhooks in SharePoint is limited to SharePoint lists.

On first glance, they seemed like they might fill a void in the SharePoint online developer toolset. I took the opportunity to explore Webhooks with a real-world scenario, and found several oddities with working with them.

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