Your organization can boost productivity by integrating processes through the Microsoft ecosystem. Collaborative tools, dashboards, and making Microsoft Teams your base of operations can all have positive impacts on your day-to-day business.

If boosting productivity alone isn’t enough, Microsoft 365 can also help your organization save money by eliminating the need for other software products. From to-do apps to form builders, when fully utilized, the 365 platform can handle many of your existing business needs all under one monthly subscription. In this recent webinar, Adam Devereaux and Rebecca Zaagman dig into all of this and so much more!

Here’s what we cover:

• Forms
• Planner
• To Do
• Outlook Online
• Office Online
• Bookings
• Power Automate
• Apps in Teams

 

Let’s dig into this webinar, please reach out if you have any questions!

Adam Devereaux:

Hello, everyone. And welcome to another Worksighted NXT episode.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. We’re excited to be here with you guys today. We are going to go ahead and jump in. One thing we want to start each of these webinars is what are the problems that our clients, so we ourselves are facing when we think about the topic that we’re talking about. So today with Microsoft 365, it’s an overwhelming platform. There are tons of apps. It’s hard to keep up. And everything is very, very quickly and rapidly changing. So that’s what we’re going to cover today is just eight quick ways new apps or tools or features that you can make the most out of your Microsoft 365 subscription.

Adam Devereaux:

We had to pick what out there within the ecosystem we think people would get the most value from. There are certainly other things as well. But hopefully you find this useful and feel free to ask questions. We’re going to have time for Q and A afterwards. So if there are other things, aside from the ones that we’re talking about, you have questions about, feel free to throw them out there and we’ll answer them if we can.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Is Adam wearing makeup? Is the first question that came in.

Adam Devereaux:

Oh, thanks Jeff. Thanks Jeff. Nope, no makeup artists here today. These are just all natural.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Awesome. There is also the fact that you can actually save money by switching over to the Microsoft stack. So a lot of these things are things you’re already paying for as part of your subscription. So we’ve seen customers that are paying another subscription for a former survey tool for an automation tool. Somebody we’re just talking to used Wufoo as well as Zapier and another to-do tool. So there might be people in your organization that are already paying for this, either out of their pocket and expensing it or with their company card. So you can actually save your company money by bringing more stuff into the Microsoft ecosystem. And the more you put in the more powerful it becomes. So yeah, let’s dig in. What do we got first Adam.

Adam Devereaux:

So first thing we’re going to be talking about something that I guess in some ways is not exactly within Office 365, but it is something that is within the Microsoft ecosystem and it integrates with Office 365 and that is Edge right.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Edge.

Adam Devereaux:

Edge, the old thing that you use to install a different browser. Well, I do want to talk about new Edge.

Rebecca Zaagman:

New Edge.

Adam Devereaux:

New Edge.

Rebecca Zaagman:

It’s an Adam term, right?

Adam Devereaux:

No, Microsoft actually uses that term. And I think they kind of have to, because Edge before had a fairly rough like reputation. It wasn’t the greatest browser out there.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Internet explorer is what you’re talking about?

Adam Devereaux:

Internet Explorer is different, but what makes new Edge is I think old Edge people just kind of treated like Internet Explorer.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

The thing you just didn’t want to use.

Rebecca Zaagman:

They needed a better marketing department.

Adam Devereaux:

Right. And it’s a total rewrite. So the new Edge, the big difference is that it’s using the chromium engine and the chromium engine is this open source browser engine that is the basis of Chrome as well. It’s what Chrome uses. And it’s kind of an interesting scenario now because Microsoft actually is contributing to the chromium open source platform and so they’ve helped Google and Google’s help

Rebecca Zaagman:

They actually worked together?

Adam Devereaux:

They’ve worked together. It’s kind of crazy.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Wow.

Adam Devereaux:

But now the new Edge that’s built into your Windows 10 or Windows 11, if you have a newer version of Windows 10 it’s really got a lot of compelling features. And I would say there’s a lot of independent third-party browser reviews out there that are saying in some ways it’s better, it’s a little bit faster, uses less memory. That’s one thing I noticed between sleeping tabs and start up boost and some of these other performance enhancements that Microsoft has added, that it does perform better on my laptop than what Chrome does. Chrome quickly eats a lot of memory and Edge doesn’t seem to have that effect as much.

Adam Devereaux:

Now, how do I know if I have a new Edge, you might say, and that’s the reason I have this up here is that this is the old icon on the left old and busted Edge and then this is the new icon in the right.

Rebecca Zaagman:

It looks like a nice wave. It’s a new wave.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes, it’s the new wave, right.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Ann pointed out in the chat to her it’s like a dashboard for your Office 365 ecosystem. I think that’s a great way to talk about it. She also mentioned better security. So I know you wanted to talk about profiles, single sign on.

Adam Devereaux:

Better security and privacy. And this is a controversial topic, but while Google has added some of these capabilities into Chrome, they’re harder to get to, harder to manage. And honestly this is just personal opinion, but if I were to list all of the big like companies out there and what I would, I guess, rank in terms of privacy, I think Apple and Microsoft are pretty much at the top of the list. The companies that I trust with my personal data or my organization’s personal data.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Interesting.

Adam Devereaux:

Great.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Speaking of Apple can Mac users use Edge?

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So it Edge is available on Mac, Windows obviously, Linux, Android devices, iOS devices. So it’s cross-platform.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Awesome.

Adam Devereaux:

And that feeds into really that first important issue, which is that nowadays for browsers they all support this but it’s sync. So then if I’m logging into Chrome on a new computer, I’m using Chrome, or in this case, now I’m using Edge on a different computer it synchronizes my settings, my preferences, my bookmarks, my collections, all of these different things from one computer to another, it’s like my browser stack.

Rebecca Zaagman:

With the security of Microsoft 365, single access, single sign-on.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And so that’s really powerful from an organizational perspective. So for you as an individual on your home computer you can use Edge and use your Hotmail account, or live.com account or something that personal Microsoft account. But in this case, you can see here, it’s saying Adam.devereaux@worksighted.com. My work account, my Azure ID account is what my sync is being tied to. And as an organization, if you’re really into the modern desktop world that can be enforced. And so it functions like a password manager, that’s the other big thing that synchronizes that we just can’t live without because all our passwords embedded in the browser. And that actually can migrate over from Chrome to Edge. So Edge can import your existing passwords.

Rebecca Zaagman:

That’s good to know.

Adam Devereaux:

Which is pretty cool. So, privacy the reason I mentioned that is natively Microsoft makes it very easy with Edge. I’d compare it to kind of like Brave browser or Firefox and being more class-leading for privacy. You can block third party cookies right off the bat block trackers. You can easily choose what level of tracking prevention you want to enable. You can choose what clears when you close it. You can send, do not track requests, which is something that Apple really led on with Safari. And really there’s a lot of other security and privacy capabilities. Another big one is this defender smart screen and you can use secure DNS. And a lot of these things are supportable across different browsers, but this is now built natively into Edge in Windows. And I think it’s worth the look.

Adam Devereaux:

Now, a couple of the other things I just want to mention are profiles. So this is huge. You notice they have different profiles here. You can just add a profile. So if you have different family members or in my case, lots of different business identities that you might be utilizing and switching between, you can create different profiles that containerized all of the settings and cookies and everything else are all in that particular profile. And you can even embed those different profiles or pin those profiles to your task bar here. And you’ll note that I’ve got a different one here, for example, that I’ll use later.

Adam Devereaux:

One of the other things is the collections. So it’s almost like, I think you mentioned as like Pinterest in the browser, it’s like bookmarks, but on steroids, it allows you to create these different collections of websites. And in fact, it actually is integrated with Pinterest. There’s like a partnership now too. Another thing I use, this is an app built in or added on that it’s the, my app secure sign-in extension, but it lets me quickly access all of my different Microsoft 365 applications. And as Anne said right off the bat, it’s integrated with my organization. So I can customize this feed, but I can also get to my Office 365 recent applications and search in the organization as well.

Adam Devereaux:

One other capability is vertical tabs. So rather than your tabs being on the top, you can enable it so that they go on the side. So it’s kind of like this, tabs over here which is a more efficient use of, I think the-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Screen.

Adam Devereaux:

… screen real estate. Yeah, exactly.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Quick question from David doesn’t Windows 10 collect a lot of your data, does that not extend to Edge as well? Which I think you just covered a little bit of that in the settings there.

Adam Devereaux:

So you can definitely control both with Windows 10 and with Edge what Microsoft is allowed to collect. I think a lot of times, so the modern world, like the amount of information that’s being collected on all of us is just staggering if you really understand a lot of it. One of the questions is what does that company then do with that data and how long do they retain it? And what exactly is it that’s retained? Is it anonymized, or is it tied to an individual? And really one of the big things here is whether or not they’re using that as a way to make revenue.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

So it’s a bigger topic, but that’s the lens at which I look at it.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So you can change your settings right there through Edge. How about for Windows 10?

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And there are privacy settings within Windows 10 you can change as well and turn off those different data collection points that Microsoft has.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Awesome. Cool. Well, that was a great intro to Edge. Not the Edge of the past.

Adam Devereaux:

There’s reasons you might want to consider it. That’s how I’ll put it. And it’s got some cool capabilities. It’s part of my portfolio. I definitely use other browsers as well like Chrome and Firefox. But Edge is kind of starting to become my go-to, my default.

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right. So now we’re going to hop into Office and Outlook online. So I’m going to go ahead and steal the screen-share Adam.

Adam Devereaux:

Go right ahead.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So one thing that’s cool… So you’ll see that I am using Edge here, I have been trying to make that migration because it is really, really helpful. So we are in my Outlook online right here. So I have coworkers that actually use Outlook online, exclusively. They don’t even use Outlook desktop app.

Adam Devereaux:

So what you mean by Outlook online? That’s one of the questions here.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. So you can go to portal the office.com, click on this little waffle here and go to your Outlook. And this is how to access your email online from any device, anywhere in the world as long as there’s there’s internet access.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And you’ll know now is Outlook.office.com. So you can just type that in as well. And the alternative here would be Outlook the app on your computer or Outlook the app on your mobile device, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep. Yep. Exactly. So a couple things that I like here is that it’s a more simplified interface. So Outlook on the desktop is just a little bit overwhelming for me, but that’s going to be personal preference. There’s a lot of options. You still have a lot of the same things that you can do right here in these three little dots, the ellipsis there will drop down some things to highlight.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I love they shared a Teams function so you can just pop this in here, type in a channel that you are working with in teams. So let’s say this goes to our content team. Oops, sorry about that. So I can scroll down and find, okay, this is exactly where I want to put it great. And share it. And it’s going to put a snippet of that email right into Teams, as well as the ability to open up that email in Outlook.

Adam Devereaux:

Awesome.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep. So a couple other things you can snooze emails. So maybe like, “Oh, I can’t think about this right now, but next week is going to be the right timing for me,” so I can snooze it. So that actually leaves my inbox and comes back in as redelivered as an unread message next week, this weekend, whatever that may be.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. That’s a really cool capability. Like when you have a bunch of emails and you just want to get one out there to deal with it later.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. Let’s put it out there. So you can also flag emails from here. And that will be important. I’ll touch on that when we talk about Microsoft To Do. So, I’ll go ahead and flag this one. This is a presenter reminder for the webinar that we’re on right now. There’s a ton of other stuff you can do in here, but I did want to highlight this left-hand side over here is going to be quick access to some frequently used apps. This is a spot to find Microsoft To Do attachments and… Just make sure I’m sharing my screen okay.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Okay, great. And then you’ve got your calendar right up here. And this is actually one of my favorite new features of Office and Outlook online it’s called Outlook Boards. So up here in the top right corner you can see there’s a couple of different ways to view your calendar. You can see it by your day, your work week, week, month, but Board is a new function. This is only available for Outlook online right now, potentially it might come out for the desktop as well, but the Board is basically a dashboard that you can create completely customized to be what you want to see. So for example, I have on here this is my next three days, my calendar, here’s my one day view. So I can drill in a little bit and see what’s going on in the next couple hours, my tasks from Microsoft To Do, I can even pin some documents here that I frequently use. So these are three-

Adam Devereaux:

That’s awesome.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Two Excel docs and a Word doc that I use. This is a picture from my hometown in Alaska-

Adam Devereaux:

That’s totally customizable. Like you’ve created that exactly how you want it.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. You can drag it around. You can change the colors of these cards. You can add due dates that’s going to sync to your calendar as well as your To Do app. You can add in One Note notebooks, contact cards so that you can quickly, I’ve got Steve’s on here. Hey, Steve, he’s behind the camera. But I can quickly send him emails and phone or call his extension right quickly from this dashboard. Adding the weather.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So like I said, if you go to Outlook online, click on calendar, change your view to Board, that’s how you do that. You can use this, add to Board right here to see all the different things you can add onto that Board. So, that’s just a cool new dashboard that you can use to keep everything focused. I like to start out my day here and then check in throughout the day to make sure that I’m on track accomplishing what I need to accomplish that day.

Adam Devereaux:

I noticed there’s a couple other icons up in the top right over by your photo. So like meet now and it looks like chat.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. So your One Note feed things like that.

Adam Devereaux:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, absolutely. You got your, my day, which is going to pull up looks like your calendar and you can hop right over To Do as well. So these are all things that they’re not huge time savers, but it keeps you in one space where you’re not having to click through a bunch of different apps and things. Like we talked about in the beginning, the more that you get into this ecosystem, the more powerful it is. So bringing your to-do tasks in here can integrate to your calendar, can integrate to all right inside teams. So definitely super powerful there.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Another thing I wanted to note if you’re interested in using Microsoft Word online you can also do that from a browser anywhere in the world, anywhere that there’s internet, you can access all of your documents here. So one thing that I kind of-

Adam Devereaux:

As long as they’re stored in Microsoft 365.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

Like in One Note, or a Team, or shared SharePoint or something like that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

And really, that’s like getting to the heart of the efficiency and productivity boosts is that’s a big step when you’re getting your files that you’re working on in the platform itself.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. Because for awhile we were using Dropbox. And so that was like a separate ecosystem.

Adam Devereaux:

And the network Drive before that, and both at the same time.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So we’ve recently made the switch over to One Drive ourselves and it’s hard. Like it’s hard work to change where stuff is stored and how do I find this and how do I share that? But man, it’s been really cool. So one thing that I will just point out here is that this pulls in… So I just clicked on Word over here on the left-hand side. You can also do it from the left up here, and this is going to pull your Microsoft Word dashboard. So it’s going to pull up recent documents from Teams, from Outlook, from your desktop, basically anything that you’ve opened in Microsoft Word will show up right here.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, that’s pretty cool when you think about how to find things. I’m doing much less searching in my File Explorer and a lot more of like, Hey, let me look at my recent docs, because typically I’m working on the same document. So you can see over here, this was shared in a Teams chat. This was one that was sent in an email, things like that.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, that’s pretty cool. And that’s going to be the same for Excel, PowerPoint things like that.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, absolutely. So just a good general awareness of Office online, and that applies to the office app on the mobile device as well. It’s another way that you can quickly get to all those recent documents and edit, and share, and work on them and all those things as well.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep. And you click on that waffle, you can see all the different Office 365 apps that are available to you.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yes.

Adam Devereaux:

S thanks for that preview. I think the one thing to note is really that the look app on your computer is still pretty powerful, but Microsoft is consistently adding new features to Outlook on the web faster than Outlook on the… It’s kind of like the preview release or where you can really get the latest and greatest. And then eventually a lot of those things will be moved over to Outlook as well.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Great. Yeah. And that’s the power of these online apps subscription-based apps is that they are consistently being updated and you get access to the best consistently. We did have a couple of questions come in.

Adam Devereaux:

And delegate permissions. That’s a great question. So this is, if you need to open another account, if you need to open somebody else’s email you can do that in Office online right now. So if you are still sharing.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I’m not but I can.

Adam Devereaux:

I’ll do that in a minute since I’m going to be switching over here anyway. So let me share my screen. So I’m in Outlook here and then if I click up on my picture in the top right hand corner, I’ve got open another mailbox, and this is where I can just type in the name of whatever that-

Adam Devereaux:

Yep.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Share your screen.

Adam Devereaux:

So I’ll look online, click on my picture, or it might be your initials if you don’t have a picture loaded in and then here’s open another mailbox. And so, one for example is an SMS mailbox and I can open that up and it will what’s actually kind of cool about this is you can actually have multiple kinds of mailboxes open at one time that you have access to. So it will allow you to have one mailbox in one tab and your mailbox still in another tab. So this is a really kind of powerful way to do that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Katie asks another question. Can you send an email as someone versus opening someone’s mailbox?

Adam Devereaux:

Yes, you can, as well, if you have that capability, there’s the, the from if you are attached and you have the capability to permission you can change that from, to something else as well, similar to the desktop client. All right. So next, we’re going to talk about Microsoft Bookings and FindTime and the difference between those two applications those services. They’re both in the realm of scheduling meetings, scheduling services, but they’re different and in a pretty fundamental way.

Adam Devereaux:

And the long and short of that, I’ll just start with the preview is Bookings is really like the self-service scheduling platform that you can use for a variety of capabilities all the way up to let’s say you’re a service offering organization to the public where it’s something like haircuts, or pet appointments, and you want to create a self service webpage that people can go to and self book appointments based on the conditions you’ve set for even a variety of services and a variety of different staff members that you can manage. But you can also simplify it and just use it as a personal thing if you want to have a website that people can go to or a way that people can click a link and then book a time on your calendar.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. It’s just so convenient for me. I’m working with a couple of different vendors and people are reaching out saying like, “Hey, let’s find a time, send me some availability.” And instead of the back and forth of, “Hey, I’m available here, but you’re not there.” It’s like, “Hey, just find a time book it and we’ll make it work.”

Adam Devereaux:

I kind of liked that personally when somebody has that capability, because I can do it immediately. It’s manageable within… I always hate tasks nowadays where it has to span across multiple touch points, but it’s so much more easier for that to just fall off. People forget about it that way. So if I care about scheduling that I can just click that link, find the time that works for me, book it on their calendar done.

Adam Devereaux:

So first I’m going to show how you get to it. So one is I’m an Edge here and then here’s the app launcher as Rebecca showed. If you go to like portal of office.com and you’ll have this as well, so you can click on all apps and then bookings is here. I’m going to type in bookings here. You can see I used it recently, so I can just click on bookings. And then that takes you to the… And this is the new bookings view you’ll note up in the top right hand corner. It says, try the new bookings. And I have it in dark mode as well.

Adam Devereaux:

So right off the bat, over here on the left, I can pick different calendars. So you can create specific calendars for specific bulk groups of services or purposes but this is my personal one. Under settings this is really where we can add things like staff members, in this case it’s just me, I’m bookable. I have a 30 minute Teams call as a service. I can define what that service is, when that service can be booked, whether I need buffer time, the maximum number of people, what time increments, what maximum lead time. Maybe I want somebody to not be able to book it less than eight hours before the time.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

And then I signed in this case, assigning it to me and I can create like reminders and customize, do I want an SMS reminder that somebody can sign up for et cetera, et cetera. And then at the end of the day you can share just this URL, embed that into your email signature.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Oh, cool.

Adam Devereaux:

But you can also actually have that embedded into social media as well. So it could connect with Facebook.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So one way that we use this internally, is our design team their schedules are pretty backpack. So what a customer needs some time with a designer to figure out a new solution, we got a drop down that shows our three different designers calendars and our sales team can just book a meeting with them there so they can figure out what’s the next best time to meet with one of the designers. So Ann mentioned one of the shortcomings she found is that you cannot have multiple sites unless I’m not understanding it well, meaning it is tied to the organization versus the individual. So we started looking at Calendly due to this.

Adam Devereaux:

Well, I’d love to hear more specifics about that, but one of the things you can do is you can create a Bookings calendar that’s more generic as well. So if you wanted to, let’s say it’s haircuts and they’re even business prebuilt kind of business types within here in terms of services and what’s being done and you can add different services, let’s say, let’s call this a color and then that’s going to be a two hour service and whether or not you want there to be a teams meeting built into it or not into that invite. When is that available? And then ultimately when I complete this is going to have its own URL specifically for this calendar. And you’ll know, over here now on the left, it says haircuts. And so if I want to open another calendar I can type that in. I think you had one that you shared with me.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And one limitation I did find was that you can’t book a meeting with multiple people. So for example, on this one, we had our project manager, Erin, Cody, and Sydney, all on the ability to be able to book a time with all three of them and bookings is really designed for one-on-one meetings.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So you can choose which one to book a meeting with, but you can’t book a meeting with all three, which is where Microsoft Findtime comes in as an awesome opportunity for scheduling meeting with somebody external from your organization.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And we have basically used it for that purpose, but we kind of pre-booked blocks of time. And then whoever the person was that got the invite on our side then forwarded that invite to the other people.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

But there needed to be pre coordination as to what time slots were available for that session.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, so that’s a great segue into FindTime, like what is FindTime? How do I get to it? Same sort of thing. You can go to Outlook.office.com/find time if you just search FindTime. And ultimately it’s like FineTime.microsoft.com. This is an add-in, you don’t have to add, so you’d click this install for free. If you already have Office 365 you can sign in then to find your FindTime dashboard. Once it’s added, you’re in it. And at that point how do you use it? Well, if you’re in, let’s go back to-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Your Outlook?

Adam Devereaux:

Outlook here, I’m going to create a new message. And I want to schedule a meeting, let’s say with Rebecca and Steve, and one of my other colleagues, Chris, and then over here I click the three dots or sorry, the three dots down here where I’d do like an attachment or a picture or something along those lines. And then you can see now FindTime is one of the options that comes up and then FindTime it’s going to pop up here on the right. And it’s going to let me set some things about this. Do I want that to be a 45 minute time or 30 minute time period or an hour, whatever timeframe I want, do I want it within work hours? What time zone?

Adam Devereaux:

And because these people are within my organization, it’s actually going to look at their availability and then show me who’s available in these different time slots. You can see this week, it’s pretty tough, not a lot of people available here.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Definitely not this week to be fair.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. So if I go out another week and I can see what days even have some time slots available, and I say, let’s do.

Rebecca Zaagman:

You select a couple of times, right?

Adam Devereaux:

9:00 AM, 11:00 AM. And then-

Rebecca Zaagman:

And it shows a green when there is availability on everyone’s calendar?

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. So I picked a six times it’s a Teams meeting and I can change like my pole settings, whether or not I get notified about pole updates and I add to email, and at this point now I can close this and it’s added the meeting pole table right to my email. And so when I send this to somebody and I’m going to go ahead and send that meeting to talk about stuff and then they’re going to receive this poll. Those are times that I picked, I already know, I preselected those as times I’m available for. So they’re going to be able to click on that and then pick what times work best for them set their preference as like, this is the one that works best. But also these other two times worked for me as well. And that’s really where you get into the ability to book a meeting as an individual with a lot of different people. So that’s more of like, Hey, I want to schedule a meeting and there’s a bunch of external people.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

I’m not going to just send out a meeting just be like, “Hey, what’s a time that works for everybody?” Eight people, it’s chaos. So this is a simple and fast way to make that meeting happen.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep, Absolutely. And Mary Beth, you asked if the user on the receiving end doesn’t have FindTime will they be able to respond and see the options? Absolutely. It’s really cool because you can actually put which one you prefer. So like, okay, I’m available for these three of the six, but I really do prefer options one and two. So that makes it pretty cool because as the organizer you can actually look through it and be like, “Okay, it works for everyone, but there’s two preferences on this time. So we’re going to go ahead and make that work.”

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. In fact at that point, it’s something that is able to be used by people that aren’t even on Office 365, it can be Gmail or whatever email service. So it’s really just a web they click on that URL to go to a website to pick their times easy-peasy.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep. Absolutely.

Adam Devereaux:

So that was Bookings and FindTimes. Certainly more we could talk about with those, but now we’re going to talk about what we already mentioned, Microsoft Forums.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Microsoft Forums. Okay. It looks like Ken might be having a little bit of sound issues, but other people are saying that it’s fine. So sorry about that, Ken, I hope it gets figured out okay.

Adam Devereaux:

Generally, if you’re having trouble with the live we will post the video that will have clear audio at that point. So apologies.

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right. So I’m going to steal the screen share from you again, Adam and now we are going to hop into Microsoft Forums. So we did enter this before. So this is a way to do surveys, forms online, a way that you can collect data in a really easy way instead of emailing a bunch of people like, “Hey, send me your t-shirt size” or, “Hey, I need some feedback on X, Y, and Z.” You can create a quick form to gather that feedback. It’ll all end up in an Excel doc for you. And you can require what information you need, which makes it really powerful. So we’ve seen customers, like we said earlier, use and pay for subscriptions outside of Microsoft for something like Woofoo or Survey Monkey and those definitely have their time in place if you need some really more intense survey functionality, those might still be a great option for you, but for the vast majority of our clients and people that we’ve talked to Microsoft Forums can be a really great option.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And even if you have forms that somebody within your organization like marketing is using because of the more mailing list type functionality, Forums is something that everybody can use at different times and get value from. And I think I just wanted to highlight what you mentioned about enforcing the data collection like that’s really one of the most powerful features of using a Forum versus some other means of collecting that information. You can create mandatory fields. You can structure the data in the way that you want. So rather than it just being free text, you can ask a specific question and then it’s going to give you between those options. So the data that you get out at the end is just so much more powerful. It’s already collected in one place.

Adam Devereaux:

And that’s what really can make Forums a better way to handle that anytime you need to get information from a bunch of people or maybe even a start of a process. Like you want to kick off a start of some process, some sort of request, some sort of something to happen and using a Forum to do that can be a great way as a starting point for a department, which is what you’re showing us. One of the options is that you use a Forum for like your marketing requests.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, absolutely. So I just I want to show how easy it is to get started. So again, I clicked on my waffle found forms and I’m going to click on new form here. So Microsoft is awesome with having prebuilt templates, things that make creating a lot easier. So I’m just going to call this, let’s see employee feedback. One thing that it’s going to do is pop up this little lightning bolt, which means it has some ideas for us.

Adam Devereaux:

Oh, that’s interesting.

Rebecca Zaagman:

It uses AI to look at recommendations for our past, or it looks at the title and says, what questions might be interesting to this person that’s building this form what’s relevant. So for example, there’s two pages of things here of suggestions. So I’m going to go ahead and quickly just add all. And what it does it automatically populates all of those questions in here. YOU can see that we’ve got some multiple choice questions. They have a chart here so that you can do some strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Adam Devereaux:

So what if I want to add like a new section onto it what choices do I have?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep. So we’ve got a multiple choice, you’ve got a text field, a rating, a date or more options, a like it, which is the chart. You can upload a file, do a ranking or net promoter score. You can divide it into sections, lots of different things. So let’s go ahead and say that we are entering a choice. So what’s your favorite activity we did last year?

Adam Devereaux:

I thought you were going to say color.

Rebecca Zaagman:

What’s your favorite color? I don’t know. You can add different options. You can also add another option, which is kind of nice. And then they can populate their own answer. You can also make it check boxes by doing multiple answers. So they can multi-select, you can make it required.

Adam Devereaux:

That’s a big one, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

You love that one. You can even take it a step farther and add some, what they call branching.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And this is really powerful as well. One of the other things that really is not great about paper forms is you have the full form regardless of what you’re entering. And then sometimes based on my choices, half of that form isn’t relevant anymore.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Exactly. Yep. So for example, maybe we wanted to show different questions to a manager in our organization versus an individual contributor. So I could say, Hey, after… I know that this person is a manager I want them to skip to question six. So they’re not going to see questions three, four, and five, because it’s not relevant to them.

Adam Devereaux:

That’s awesome.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So you can get pretty complicated there. But it’s pretty easy to use. And what it’s going to do is populate all of your responses over here in this tab that says responses, and then you can see all of the data that’s submitted and you can open it in Excel. So, that’s pretty cool. You can also put a theme into it. So, that just makes it look a little bit pretty. So maybe we want people to feel-

Adam Devereaux:

Festive.

Rebecca Zaagman:

… festive with some confetti there, or you can even upload your own picture, things like that.

Adam Devereaux:

So now how do I share this with people?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Great question. This is a preview right here, you press share. One thing to note is if you want people outside of your organization to be able to see the form make sure you do, anyone can respond. Or only people in my organization can respond. If it’s only people in my organization, they will need to be signed into their Microsoft 365 account. But then their email is automatically collected.

Adam Devereaux:

That’s nice.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Which is great. Anyone can respond, their email is not going to be automatically collected. So then you want to make sure that you’ve got an email field or a way to contact them if you need to.

Adam Devereaux:

So I have a link I can share that link in email or I could embed it into like a SharePoint site.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep.

Adam Devereaux:

What about like into Teams?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. And share whatever. It’s just a link. Yeah. You can shorten it even will do it there.

Adam Devereaux:

One question we got is if there is a notification option with Forums so that you receive a notification once somebody submits something.

Rebecca Zaagman:

There is. Yep. So if you click on the little epilepsis over here, you can do settings. And then you’ve got just a few options here. And then right here, get email notification of each response. One thing that I don’t love is that it doesn’t send you the details of that response via email. So we actually used the power automate flow to send the entire contents of that form via email. So I can quickly look at it and be able to take action there.

Adam Devereaux:

Pretty cool.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So that is Forums in a nutshell. One thing I did want to show you is one that was a little bit more active, so you can see the analytics side of it. And that’s where this stuff gets really powerful is when you can use the data that’s submitted in a way that’s going to inform your decision making. So for example, this is the marketing project request form that we have. This has had a couple of different iterations, but you can see we’ve had 77 responses. Really it takes 94 minutes to complete. I think somebody just accidentally had it open. But you can see here, we can see which team is submitting the most requests to us. So we’ve got 12 requests coming in from training.

Adam Devereaux:

That’s cool it has graphs built right into it.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. Graphs is built into it. So then I can use that information to say like, “Hey, I need to have some more sync ups with our training team because it looks like they’ve got a lot of needs from us. Let’s make sure that we’re on the same page.” I can look at what type of requests are coming in. And again, it shows a nice, colorful little graph, things like that. And then it also populates everything right over into exhale.

Adam Devereaux:

Awesome.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, that is Microsoft Forums. Great, easy way to collect information.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay. Well, thanks for going over that. I think the next on our list to segue way a little bit is Microsoft Lists. So we’re going to talk about Microsoft Lists. What is it and why you might want to use it? It’s a fairly complex topic because SharePoint Lists and Lists they’re essentially the same. List is an enhanced capability on top of SharePoint Lists. They’ve been around for a very long time, but there’s lots of great cloud native capabilities now in Microsoft 365.

Adam Devereaux:

And the core question is like, what is a list? And it’s a type of data storage. It is a place, a way that you can store information with a variety of people with co-workers you can store it, you can modify that information, use that information. But it also can be a data storage repository for some other processes and functions, things like Power Apps and power BI that you use to store information for that application.

Adam Devereaux:

So I’m going to start with a fairly basic use of Lists. Again, core question, how do I get to it? Same sort of thing, it’s going to be in your apps. If you have it, you can see Lists in this icon right here. You can also add that as an application, if you have, which is one of the Edge features I didn’t talk about, but you can add a website as an app on your computer so that you can see that as a separate. You see here’s my Gmail, for example, and that just loads that in. You’ll notice also that my Gmail is just full of junk mail. But it’s separate from all the other tabs and it basically is a way to get to that application easily and quickly. And here I have Lists like that here as well.

Adam Devereaux:

All right. So what is a List? I can show you here’s different Lists that I’ve already have, and that I’ve used here, but let’s say I want to create a new List and I’ll show you Microsoft has here where you can create a blank List. You can import an Excel document. If you already have data in that form, in an Excel doc that you want to use with Lists or an existing List. And then they have these templates here and so you can see there’s issue tracker, employee onboarding, content scheduler. I’ll show you this asset manager.

Adam Devereaux:

So here’s a List of different content. You can see there’s a column and then there’s rows. So just like Excel in that way, you’ve got columns that you get to define what type of column that is and information is allowed to be in it, the format of it, everything else. And then you have the entries themselves, which are the rows. So if I use this template, I get to pick different things about it like what’s the icon, et cetera, et cetera. Where do I want that to live? You can see already I have one that says asset manager. So I’ll just call it asset manager two.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Creative, I like it.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I think that’s great, is it can automatically pull information from other things in the Microsoft ecosystem. Like for example, if you’ve got something that you want to assign to someone, it can use your active directory to actually pull in that person’s name.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Or it can reference another spreadsheet, things like that.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep, absolutely.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So it’s super, super powerful, but from a very simple level, you can think of it as a amped up spreadsheet.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep. Here’s an example, let’s say that Rebecca has a laptop or something and then previously somebody else had it. And then you can basically pick that information in here. And every one of these fields is something that you create. I can show you from scratch. You can create every single column and what you want on it. I can upload an image of that. I can put in the asset tag, the status is one that there’s preset things so it’s available. And let’s just put something in here. And the asset type, it’s going to be a tablet. Maybe I care about what color it is. When was it purchased? Purchase price, you can see it’s dollars basically order number, et cetera, et cetera. And I can also add attachments to this.

Adam Devereaux:

Now, one of the powerful things about a List and using this kind of a model versus using a spreadsheet or just the way that you can interact with it and share is through the use of views. So I can create a view that says that I only want to see available devices. And then I can customize that view, ultimately edit what that view looks like. So I can edit the current view and I can say, and you get into the old-school SharePoint, uglier view here, but I can say maybe I want some columns to not show up, or I want to filter by certain column, or I only want to show items when the asset type is equal to something. And you can see there’s a lot of power at this point to create custom views that streamline that information that’s stored in there.

Adam Devereaux:

And then I can share this with people or I can share it with my colleagues, for them to interact with it. I can embed this into a Teams channel. I can export that to an Excel document. But really where it gets powerful as well is that I can tie this into automation rules. So I can say set a reminder when due date is coming close and it has some of these prebuilt automation capabilities in here. So I add the permission for these functions to work at an email like one day beforehand and it’s going to send that, use that flow. So Microsoft automate to have a simple flow that sends me an email. Now I can create a more complex flow that says a week before the due date email the owner of that device.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

Something along those lines. And then even more than that is where you can integrate, go to Power Apps, for example, create an application based off from this form. And again, embed that into a team or have the website where people interact with it or using Power Apps on a mobile device and have access to all of that information in that functionality right there.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. And this is where we can really nerd out but no it’s extremely powerful and any information in here becomes usable by the Microsoft platform. So it’s a little bit of an in-between between Excel and to Forum where you can control what information people are putting in. You can make stuff that is required. And like Adam said, one of the things I love is that you can pop it right into a Teams channel. So I made one recently super simple and I was able to populate it within a couple minutes and then pop it into a Team so that we can collaborate on that information in real time.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And you’ll note too, that it says dotsharepoint.com Lists are built on SharePoint.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

And so everything can integrate with SharePoint, can integrate with Lists and they’re stored inside of a SharePoint site.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. So here’s one way that we’ve used Lists so that Microsoft, or that marketing request form that I was showing you all of the inputs in there actually flow over to SharePoint. And then that’s when we’re able to use Microsoft Automate to pull that information and do certain things like create a task in planner, or create a task and to do list, send an email things like that. So that’s where it gets really powerful because that information is stored in Lists. It’s super usable.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. That’s really just the starting point.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

So you can use it for like to do tracking. Things that need to be done and completed and everything else. Although, I will say that there are other applications in Microsoft 365 that might do that better already natively.

Rebecca Zaagman:

You’re right. Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

So maybe we should talk about one of those.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. One quick question that came in, can you import an existing spreadsheet into Microsoft List? And the answer is yes. Yep.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep. Absolutely. So you would do that at creating a List. So if I go back to Lists and I create new lists, one of the options is from Excel. And so then I just upload that file or I pick it from like, within my One Drive, for example.

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right. Take a deep breath. We’re doing okay on time. Just got about 10 minutes left. So we’ve got three more to go through. I’ll go pretty quick here. We definitely want to save sometime for questions, but I just wanted to share a little bit about Planner, which we just mentioned. So this is Microsoft Planner. Again, go to your waffle. You can find it right in here. It’s got that green logo there. So this is going to be something that is similar to if you’ve used Trello before. There’s a ton of productivity apps out there. So we actually did a whole webinar probably about a year ago on productivity apps in Microsoft 365. So this is going to be a very brief overview of planner. But one thing that I love is that I can access this right inside of Teams.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So the way we structure it on the marketing team is that we’ve got a different, they call them different plans, so different plans for each channel that we have. So I’ve got one for marketing collabs, sponsorships, content, and things like that. So I’m going to hop into this plan marketing collab, and you’ll see it’s organized by cards into different buckets. So the way we have it organized is to do doing bench and ideas.

Adam Devereaux:

So those are the buckets.

Rebecca Zaagman:

These are the buckets. Yep.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And they’re completely customizable. So these are the ones that work for our team, but maybe you have ones that are planned scheduled, up next, things like that. You can make these buckets whatever you want. You can see up here, this is the people that this list is shared with. And there’s a couple of different views up here. But before we get into that, these are called cards. So these are going to be the task that you’re working on inside of this bigger project or team that you’re working on. So for example, this one looks like I’ve got some sway pages to work on with training and security. Myself and Steve are both assigned to this. We can label things, we can set the progress, the priority and the due date, and then there’s going to be checklists here as well.

Rebecca Zaagman:

One thing that I don’t love about Planner is this comment section. So once you type in a comment, it will email that person, anybody else that’s assigned to that card, but it’s not a great place to really collaborate. So what I’d like to do is actually grab a link to this task right here, copy link to task, pop that into a Teams, chat or channel. And that’s where we can actually collaborate on things like that. So maybe we’re working on a sway page in relation to this card, I can copy the link to the task and then copy the link from this way page, pop i it into the Teams channel and be able to.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. So there’s ton of functionality there. You can make it exactly what your team needs. We can move them from bucket to bucket. You’ve got some chart capabilities here that can show how many tasks do we have left? How many are in each bucket? What priority levels are they at? And who has the most assigned to them right now, things like that. And you can see them in a calendar view as well. So what do we have going on this week when, when are things scheduled? So it’s kind of like, I would say light project management. So it’s all about collaboration. There’s a ton of different filtering you can do here in group by assigned to, so I can see who on our team is assigned what, progress. So those buckets you can kind of see are changing.

Adam Devereaux:

And so what happens if I assign somebody on a card?

Rebecca Zaagman:

If you assigned me on a card, then I should get an email.

Adam Devereaux:

And then is there any other way for people to interact with, do they have to go to that plan?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. So you can go to this plan so you can access it in Office online, you can access it in Teams. So typically what we do on a weekly basis as we go through the cards together as a team to be able to review, okay, are we on track with these? Which ones are past due? What do we need to elevate to a higher priority this week? So I actually like the online version a little bit better than the one in Teams, but if I just need something quick, I’ll go to the one in Teams be able to see it from there.

Adam Devereaux:

And you can embed a specific plan into a team and a channel, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

So, that you access the whole thing.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep. Exactly. You can also see my tasks here over on left-hand side, all the ones that are specifically assigned to you no matter which plan they’re in or which team they are in.

Adam Devereaux:

So as a user, I can see a view of all of my tasks that have been assigned to me across all of the plans.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Correct.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. That’s pretty awesome.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. So it’s pretty powerful. And I love it because no matter who I’m working with on which team we can create a planner board together and be able to collaborate. I can assign Adam a whole bunch of tasks and make sure that he’s super busy because he’s not busy enough, right?

Adam Devereaux:

Yep. It’s kind of an interesting concept because I think when it comes down to it keeping track of assignments and to do management, everything else is one of the biggest challenges most organizations and individually a lot of us have as well. Where it’s like, how do we make sure that we’re working on the right things and we keep track of everything. Email kind of is terrible for that stuff.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

It’s just like, “Hey, I sent you an email. Now you have to do something for me.”

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right. Like you actually don’t get to control my time unless you’re my boss then I guess you do but.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, it’s kind of interesting this concept of just like, it seems like so many people just send out an email and then it’s like, “Okay, it’s off my hands now I sent an email.”

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

Yup.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So tasks can be a little bit more collaborative and things like that. So another part of tasks that’s a little bit more personal would be Microsoft To Do. And so it’s going to be more of your personal task manager. One of our favorite things is this my day view.

Adam Devereaux:

So Microsoft To Do, we’ll talk about that. That’s actually a separate functionality.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep. So you can find it up here in the top and then your waffle again, you can find it. It’s the blue check mark. You can also download the desktop app.

Adam Devereaux:

And available on mobile devices.

Rebecca Zaagman:

As well.

Adam Devereaux:

Same for Planner. Planner has a mobile app that you can use aside from being able to get to it from Teams within a mobile.

Rebecca Zaagman:

There’s a lot of different ways to do it. So Microsoft To Do again, personal to dos, you’ve got over on your left hand side here. The cool thing about it, it’s going to pull in to dos from all across the Microsoft ecosystem. So you’ll see here, like flagged emails. So when I was over an Outlook online, remember that I flagged an email, that’s going to show up right here at the top. So if you flag it, that’s going to create a, to do for you. Then if you click on this little star, it’s going to add it to your day. So it’s just a way to increase productivity, keep you making sure that you’re accomplishing what you want to accomplish each day. You can start things as important and all of your Planner tasks that have a date on them will come into this planned category. So that’s another way that they work together.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And you can see here where they’re coming from. So for example, we’ve got a golf outing tomorrow. I can see that it’s in my sponsorships to do, so that’s going to be on my sponsorship team in teams and that it’s due today. So I can open that up. Looks like I can see all of the sub tasks that were a part of that card and planner. I can open it right in Teams. I can add it to my day and I can see more information about it down there. So really powerful. Again, this is going to be for personal tasks and to dos. And the way that this looks in Teams… I actually don’t have my Teams open. Let me see really quick. I can just go here.

Adam Devereaux:

So one question may have come in is what’s the difference between tasks and to do?

Rebecca Zaagman:

So Microsoft has an awesome naming functionality that is a little bit confusing, I would say. So right over here on the left-hand side, you’ve got tasks by Planner, at some point I think it might just be called tasks, but this is going to pull in information from both To Do and Planner. So they combined them in Teams and called them tasks.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And so really to do is like your personal to-do management, task management, things that you want to keep track of like you showed like a flagged email, you can also like create to do’s right inside of Outlook online and other functions like that. And so those are for you managing your own to-dos and things that you need to accomplish. And then planner is really for being able to manage a team, something that people need to collaborate on that you’re signing through different people. Or maybe if it’s personal, you can have your own planner for yourself but you want more of that Kanban style boards and cards and be able to track things as they’re moving through the progress. Right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep, exactly. So this is how to access it through Teams on your left-hand. If it’s not, you should be able to add it by find an app right there. So, all right that kind of is a nice, tiny segue. I know we’ve only got a couple of minutes left, but we wanted to just mention apps and Teams. So another way to just boost productivity is by pulling in as much as you can right into Teams, because that is our base of operations. It’s where we’re living in our day to day. That’s where we’re at for chat and meetings a lot of communication and collaboration is happening right in there. So you can add a lot of these apps that we’ve talked about today right into Teams.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. So one question that came up on Forum is if there’s a limit to how many users can be driven to a particular Forum? The answer is in how many responses can a given Forum receive. If we’re talking about a licensed Office 365, Microsoft 365 user that’s up to 50,000 responses to a given form.

Rebecca Zaagman:

That seems like enough.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay. So let me share my screen. So apps in Teams, we’re going to talk about apps and Teams and what that means. We don’t have time to go fully in depth about Power Apps, but Microsoft has some prebuilt Power Apps. And it kind of goes a little bit further than that because when we talk about Teams and Power Apps, we’re also talking about the storage and licensing for that as well. So it’s a way for you to create or have Power Apps that your people can collaborate on and really move towards Teams being that central hub for certain functions and certain types of employees in your organization for them to perform a business process functions.

Adam Devereaux:

So I’ll give you an example of that and how you get to it. So obviously first you have to be in Microsoft Teams and then if you’ve never clicked on it before, you can see, it says recent here by this. But if you just type in Power Apps, Power Space Apps, you get to the Power Apps option here. And it gives you an option, you can start by creating a custom application and you can see your recent apps, but you also have these apps here that Microsoft has pre-built. So there’s employee ideas, there’s the inspection app, issue reporting, perspective, so if you want for a employee feedback capability, bulletins is another big one that allows you to do like company broadcasted information. And then when you click on one of these, you get the ability to add that to a Team. So you do have to pick a specific team.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I’m going to pause you really quick.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes.

Rebecca Zaagman:

It might shut us off right at noon. So we apologize for running a little bit over, obviously we had a ton to cover today. Just in case it does cut us off, thank you so much for joining we’ll hang on for a couple minutes and continue to go through this. Feel free to hang on as well. So thank you so much for joining though. We really appreciate the time today.

Adam Devereaux:

Thanks everyone. So you pick a team, set up the tab and I can show you just an example. I won’t go through all this process, but over here the retail, you can see that there’s an inspection. And then this is what that inspection Power App ends up looking like. There’s three actual options here. One is managing inspections versus like inspection. And then this would be the app that the users themselves would utilize to be able to perform an inspection. What does that mean? Like I can say, okay, I’m going to look at the frozen food section. I’m going to be doing a detailed walk. I’m going to begin that inspection. I can do this on my mobile device. It may want me to take a photo. So is it filled with available products? Yes, at details like I’m going to click on this and I can upload it from my computer, but if it’s on my mobile device, I can just use the camera right on the phone.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

It’s going to say, is the packet perfect standards of display. Yes. And so then review that inspection and submit that inspection. And now I as like the manager know that that inspection has completed. And I can also then use the managed to create new inspections and new questions and all of that capability. So it just gives you a little preview of how powerful this can be to embed Power Apps inside of Teams. But we just wanted to call your attention to the prebuilt Power Apps that are out there. It’s really just the start of what can be done within this platform being able to create like custom power applications for you and your users. And I’m in kind of a demo tenant right now so it’s being a little funky.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Quick question came in from Pam. They have team members who are indicating their, it looks like their tasks aren’t sinking or updating between each other.

Adam Devereaux:

So I think the question would be what tasks would be synchronizing, right? So are you assigning two people to a Planner item and they’re not seeing them, but typically tasks aren’t going to synchronize between people. So To Do other people can’t see my to do’s, but if I create a List, a new specific list of tasks, so I can create a list here.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Not SharePoint Lists, not to be confused.

Adam Devereaux:

And so here’s one for example called Adam and Becca, and I can add a task in here. Let’s say we want to review webinar feedback and I can add Rebecca on here and say, it’s Rebecca. And so now this will show up, she will see this Adam plus Becca list in her To Do, and then this is how we can synchronize and work on two dos. Something much simpler than planner. I don’t want necessarily the full view and complexity of that. I just want a place, we could throw some to dos in here and have us both have access to that. So this is the way in which you can synchronize a list of to-dos or tasks between people.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And similar things in Planner, you have to make sure that, that Planner is actually shared with the right people. And then there should be… I’ve never had sinking issues in that way.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. So an example on that might be, if I have a Planner and maybe there is a Planner already if not, then I can basically just go in here and search Planner or tasks by Planner now. Again, it’s going to be renamed and I can create a new plan, or let’s say that there’s already an existing plan within this team.

Rebecca Zaagman:

If you create a new plan inside of that team, it’ll automatically share it with the people that are already involved in that team.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. So it’s going to create a Planner, it’s blank. You can see here I need to create my buckets. Typically, if you’re going to use the true Kanban style, what you do is you create buckets for the different stages things are moving through.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

And so then you can move those cards to those different buckets, as they’re moving through those stages of production or stages of activity or whatever status is changing on that. And that allows you to see where all these different entries are in the different buckets.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yup. Actually checking progress.

Adam Devereaux:

And so anyone who has access to this team and to this general channel here is going to have access to this Planner. And they’re all going immediately be a part of that. And so if I click assign here, I can see all of the members of that team and add them to that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right. Well, we are a couple of minutes over, so quite a few that are here with us. Thank you so much for staying on, feel free to drop any more questions in that Q and A box or in the chat. Otherwise…

Adam Devereaux:

Thanks for visiting and-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

… spending some time with us. We appreciate the questions, and feedback and the ideas that you guys have. It’s a great way to spend some time with you guys and be able to get some content out there. It’s hard to spread some of this knowledge. It’s hard to keep up with everything that’s going on. And so we’re trying to help you with that a little bit.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Absolutely. Thanks everyone. Have a great day.

Adam Devereaux:

Bye, everyone.

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