Tag:

productivity

Responsive Resolutions

by Eric Kraus January 5, 2015

written by Eric Kraus

Happy New Year.

I’m kicking off 2015 with a blog post around self-improvement. We talk a lot in the Responsive Org about continuous improvement through small, adaptive changes.

“Continually evolve based on the success/failures/learnings from previous runs”

Making it personal

I was inspired by a colleague that is applying this theory to his personal life. Steve Nguyen wrote a blog post about making 12 monthly resolutions instead of one big (bound to fail) “new year’s resolution”. I decided to do the same. And for the first month, Steve and I have challenged each other to wake up at 5am.

I’ll be documenting the journey on Twitter: @erickraus and on Storify.

January 5, 2015 0 comment

productivity

Being Helpful

by Eric Kraus March 26, 2014

written by Eric Kraus

I’m re-branding my definition of an Enterprise Social Network (ESN). The term ‘social network’ all-too-often implies something like Facebook — which people use as a platform to connect with friends/family and share stories, pictures and coordinate events. With that as a definition, the term ‘social’ itself can have a negative connotation with some people.Often, I hear co-workers say:

I’m not a social person…

The reality is that most of us are social by definition. We prefer to interact with others and exist in a community, rather than be alone. Even in the modern digital world of email, instant and text messaging, people still hang out by the breakroom and share stories and insights, ask questions and naturally collaborate on work.

Enterprise social networks were designed to harness that existing ‘social’ conversation and share it with people outside of the breakroom — across the whole enterprise.

You can use an ESN to be social –BUT– their value is in connecting people and their knowledge, across the company, to get work done.

So, to re-brand the enterprise social network definition, I had to first breakdown the major activities/benefits the network provides.

Connect With Others

For medium/large enterprises, chances are you’ll never meet a fraction of the people doing great work across your company.

ESNs help organizations be a community. Members of the network contribute-to and draw-from the network for the better of the company. The network gives people the ability to lean-in and take interest in helping others succeed.

The ah-ha moment came to our team a few months ago when Larry Kuhn, a colleague of mine from another team (and different geography), helped us on a customer issue we had been struggling with for several months. My team was one of several supporting the issue. After exhausting all of our local resources and escalation paths, I encouraged the issue owner to post the problem to Yammer. Proactively, Larry found our conversation, jumped in and made connections to new resources in the organization, whom we didn’t know. Those resources engaged with us and the customer and the issue was resolved in a matter of days. The customer later came back and said:

These are the types of results that set you apart from your competitors. Impressive.

These moments are no longer ‘ah-ha’ for our team — connecting with people from across the organization, in various roles and geographies, is our new way of working.

Be Interested, Not Interesting

I heard a great quote the other day from Noah Sparks

…Social is not so much an effort to be “interesting” but to be “interested” — that is when the MAGIC happens.

Ironically, to share in a network, you can think intrinsically. Whatmotivates you? What knowledge do you have? What can you SHARE? Then join related groups and subscribe to interesting people and topics. When you can add value, do so. But remember, it’s not about you…it’s about the solution.

A colleague of mine starts out every week by saying:

“I’d like to lean in for a moment. Is there anything I can do to help you this week?”

Our enterprise social network gives him the ability to lean in to people anywhere in the world and help them be successful.

Pieces of a Puzzle

Think of your work as a puzzle. Chances are you don’t have all the pieces when you start. You are immediately limited by what you know, who you know and where you are.

Everybody seems to have part of the answers that someone else needs

Enterprise social networks allow you to work openly and bring together the knowledge and perspective of others you may not have realized to ask. They empower other people to lean in and share, so you get all the pieces to the answer.

Being Helpful

So, to my colleagues that claim they are not ‘social’, I reply:

Being ‘social’ is about being ‘helpful’. It’s expanding the size of our team to include everyone across the company. It’s about being interested (not interesting), leaning in and sharing your piece to the puzzle.

Special thanks to Steve Nguyen, Ursula Llabres, and Matt Ontell for proofreading and supplying incredibly valuable feedback to this post.

Sources
Microsoft + Yammer: Transforming by Working Social — http://vimeo.com/69582155

~ cross posting with Medium ~

March 26, 2014 0 comment

technology

Yammer Search in IE

by Eric Kraus March 24, 2014

written by Eric Kraus

Here’s a quick little tip to add a search provider for Yammer in IE. It makes searching for a thread in Yammer SUPER fast.

Browse to Yammer and do a Search

Just do a search for “TEST”. You can optionally search in a group if you want.

Copy the URL

for example:
https://www.yammer.com/<yournetwork.com>/#/Threads/Search?type=following&utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_group_name=Inbox&search_group=&search_inbox=0&search_startdate=&search_enddate=&search=TEST

Browse to IEInternals Blog

Configure a custom search provider – http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/searchbuilder.asp

Make sure it says &search=TEST in the URL. Give the search provider a name and click Install

Make a search

Just type a search term in the address bar, then click the Yammer icon Twice

In my example, I configured it to search within a group

Other Browsers

For example, ou can do this in Chrome as well. Follow the steps above to get the Search URL.

In Chrome browser Settings… Under Search, click Manage Search Engines

Make sure to follow browser specific instructions. e.g. for Chrome, replace TEST with %s

Search in Chrome

Type “yammer.com” to activate the search then type your search keyword.

March 24, 2014 0 comment

productivity

Tackle Initiatives like a Developer

by Eric Kraus March 23, 2014

written by Eric Kraus

As a follow up to a recent post I made on Leading a Grassroots Initiative, I wanted to share a strategy I’m following to the “Experimentation” phase of my initiative.

Software development has changed dramatically in the last few years. No longer can companies afford to do long requirement-gathering sessions. The needs of the business change too quickly. Scrum/Agile development isn’t anything new, but it is becoming more critical for projects that need to show value faster.

Leading an initiative can follow many of the same methodology practices as software development.

Learn from developers

Building for Businesses and Users.

Roles

Scrum Master = Project Manager/Champion (no decision making authority)
Product Owner = Program Manager/Strategy Consultant
Development Team = Cross-functional team, empowered to agree upon and execute toward sprint commitments

Meetings

Planning Meeting – Maximum time for planning a 30-day sprint is 8 hours.
Daily scrum Meeting – 15 minutes total (what was done previous day, what will work on current day)
Sprint Review Meeting – Demonstration of what was built/learned from the experiment
Sprint Retrospective Meeting – self reflection on the team process, modify team/process for improvement during next spring

As you can see, a lot of parallels can be drawn to application development roles and process, even if the project does not directly involve development. This is something our team is practicing with success. It’s not universal, but helps a disparate team come together with a framework for working more effectively.

March 23, 2014 0 comment

technology

30 Days with Office 365 – Day 1

by Eric Kraus March 19, 2014

written by Eric Kraus

I’m kicking off 30 Days with Office 365 experiment with a Day 1 post on my Outlook experience today. Being one of the more critical tools of my work day, I thought I’d start here and see how it goes. I definitely wasn’t new to OWA (Outlook Web Access), and felt fairly confident I would be ok for awhile working via the browser.

Outlook

Pros

Login/Launch – I found the initial login/launch incredibly quick. The web page was responsive and I was in to my Inbox in seconds.

Touch Mode – On first login, the website asks me if I want to switch to desktop mode (instead of touch mode), and kindly asks me if I want to remember this setting. Since I’m on a touch-enabled laptop, I decided to stick with desktop mode for the first day.

Creating/Replying/Deleting – Creating a new message and replying were fast as expected. Same as with Outlook 2013, if I navigated away from a message (new or reply) a draft would be saved for me automatically.

Moving Messages – No issues moving messages into other folders. Right-click exposed a context menu just like in Outlook 2013 and drag-and-drop worked as well.

Cons

Browser Tab – There wasn’t an easy way to open a second tab for things. A fairly easy work-around, I simply created a second tab and navigated to the Calendar.

Threading – Every once and a while, this still throws me off. Threading works as expected, but if you fork a message, the threading does not portray this like it does in Outlook 2013. It just shows the messages in chronological order, which can give the impression that they were replies of one another, when in fact they just share the same subject. There are some dots to the left of the threads, but without an authoritative answer, I’m only guess what they mean.

Signature – I am also missing the ability to store multiple signatures, but this is very minor and hasn’t been an issue for me.

Multiple Email – Since I’m in the context of one user account, I don’t have the ability to view/send email from multiple accounts like I would in Outlook 2013. Easy work around was to have another tab open for my personal accounts. I didn’t actually do this method, and found myself using my phone more for this scenario.

Calendar

Pros

Meeting Preview – With that out of the way, the Calendar functionality really is good. The single click preview is awesome.

Single Pane – The general ability to do almost everything in a single window is really productive.

Cons

Personal Calendar – The biggest downfall for me was the inability to overlay personal calendars. I have several calendars that I use and having multiple windows open for them is a bit of a hassle. However, this won’t be the case with everyone and my phone still does an excellent job of aggregating appointments so I can see free/busy across all of them.

People

I will cover the “People” update under the Lync overview, Day 5

Tasks

Pros

Task Lists – Like Outlook 2013, Tasks are shown from Exchange, but can also be linked from SharePoint Online. With that, the same great “merged” view of different task lists

Message Followup – I rely on Tasks a lot for following up on email requests and a simple right click allows me to set a follow up flag for emails.

Cons

I really couldn’t find any thing that didn’t work.

Search

The email search works as good as Outlook 2013. However, the filters aren’t easily identifiable. Here is a list of the filters that work:

From	Searches the From field.
To	Searches the To field.
Cc	Searches the Cc field.
Bcc	Searches the Bcc field.
Participants	Searches the To, Cc, and Bcc fields.
Subject	Searches the subject.
Body or Content	Searches the message body.
Sent	Searches the date sent. You can search for a specific date or a range of dates separated by two dots (..). You can also search for relative dates: Today, tomorrow, yesterday, this week, next month, last week, past month. You can search for the day of the week or month of the year.
Received	Searches for the date received. You can use the same search terms as for Sent.
Category	Searches the Category field.
Attachment	Searches for the specified attachment by title. For example, attachment:letter.doc will find any message with an attachment named letter.doc.
Has	Use has:flag to find items that are flagged.Use has:attachment to find items that have one or more attachments.

Touch Mode

I found Touch Mode great for tablet like scenarios (triaging email, quick responses, managing calendar, etc). Though, I did have a little bit of trouble initially finding the option to switch back to desktop mode.

Touch Mode On	Touch Mode Off

Summary

All in all – it was a seamless transition for the day. No challenges navigating or working with the Outlook in the browser. I definitely did not experience any productivity loss, which was most important. I don’t think I would have any issues converting over to Outlook (online) long-term, especially with the anticipated release of Office 365 Groups, which will integrate with Yammer.

Follow this on Storify: http://storify.com/erickraus/30-days-with-office-365

March 19, 2014 0 comment

technology

30 Days with Office 365

by Eric Kraus March 19, 2014

written by Eric Kraus

I’m kicking off an experiment where I’ll use only browser-based applications via O365 for 30 days. You can follow the story on Twitter with #30daysO365 or on Storify: http://storify.com/erickraus/30-days-with-office-365.

There is also an embedded feed for Storify on the lower right of the front page of the blog.

March 19, 2014 0 comment

technology

SharePoint Conference 2014 – Enterprise Social Sessions

by Eric Kraus March 12, 2014

written by Eric Kraus

I’m completely plagiarizing this from Christophe Fiessinger…stealing from an internal Yammer post.

Here is a list of Enterprise Social sessions from the recent SharePoint Conference. See other posts on content from SPC2014: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | All Session Recordings (Channel 9)

Product

SPC246 Knowledge Management with SharePoint and Yammer – Jan Skjoy
SPC248 Yammer External Networks: Engaging Customers and Partners – Rich Wood
SPC282 Microsoft’s vision and roadmap for Enterprise Social – Christophe Fiessinger & Juliet Wei
SPC392 Measuring Business Value and taking action with Yammer – Chris Gideon
SPC284 Harnessing social technologies with Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Girish Raja
SPC368 Overview of configuring Yammer SSO & Directory Sync – Brian Lyttle
SPC3991 Yammer mining – dig in and “listen” to what your big *social* data is saying – Richard diZerega

Journey/Adoption

SPC239 Real-world, best practices for making enterprise social successful Steve Nguyen
SPC247 Successful team collaboration with Yammer & SharePoint – Chad Slipka & Angus Florance
SPC263 Engaging with Front Line Workers – Angus Florance & Steve Nguyen
SPC264 Best practices for breaking down organizational barriers using Yammer – Allison Michels & Steve Nguyen
SPC266 Driving enterprise social from the bottom up – Virpi Oinonen
SPC275 How to become a Yammer Power User in 75 minutes – Allison Michels
SPC280 Microsoft: Our Enterprise Social Journey – Chris Slemp & Ethan Gur-esh

Developer

SPC332 Overview of Yammer app development – Brian Lyttle
SPC371 Building RESTful Yammer Apps in SharePoint using Open Grap – Chris Johnson
SPC378 Make your SharePoint portal social in 1-2-3! – Runar Olsen & Thomas Molbach
SPC380 Integrating Yammer and SharePoint using .NET – Steve Peschka & Cameron Askew
SPC405 Futuristic Search applications using Kinect and Yammer! – Chris Givens

Executive track

SPC104 A responsive organization stays ahead of the competition – Adam Pisoni
SPC112 Work like a network: The power of Enterprise Social – Jared Spataro
SPC2017 The Shift From Simple Sharing To Purposeful Collaboration – Alan Lepofsky & Constellation

Customers

SPC311 Nationwide: Building a World-Renowned Intranet with SharePoint 2013 and Yammer – Jeff Schuman
SPC386 Trek Bikes: pedaling past complex collaboration problems in the enterprise – Steve Novoselac
SPC295 Cargill: Real-world challenges and value in introducing enterprise social – Melanie Hohertz

March 12, 2014 0 comment

technology

SharePoint Conference 2014 – Day 3

by Eric Kraus March 6, 2014

written by Eric Kraus

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Enterprise Social Sessions (recorded) | All Session Recordings (Channel 9)

Cloud Productivity

Menchie’s productivity case study

Outdated and Unreliable IT Tools
Unified Cloud-Based Productivity Tools
Mobile Productivity
Reduced Costs
Streamlined IT Administration
A Platform for Growth

Yammer

Success Center – for training, case studies, guidance for planning your enterprise social journey

Microsoft + Yammer: Transforming by Working Social

InfoPath Update

http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/31/update-on-infopath-and-sharepoint-forms/

{more to come}

Project

Sharing and Collaborating in Project 2013 – free webcast

March 6, 2014 0 comment

technology

Outlook Natural Language

by Eric Kraus March 3, 2014

written by Eric Kraus

I learn something every day. Here’s a cool tip a colleague of mine shared internally today. When scheduling a meeting in Outlook, you can use natural language to quickly set the date.

For example, you could say “today” or “tomorrow” or “next week” or better yet “today + 4 days”. Here are some screenshots of it in action: