Create a Microsoft Team for your School Staff

Create a Microsoft Team for your School Staff

by | Apr 1, 2020 | Office 365, Teams

Having a Microsoft Team for all your school staff gives everyone a single place for communications, video meetings and other resources.  Stop everyone from searching through their email inbox for shared files, video meeting links and conversations.  Set up a single collaborative space and make life easier.

A Microsoft Team for your School Staff provides a single collaborative space where you can:

  • Communicate with Staff
  • Share Files
  • Store shared information in the OneNote notebook

Rather than requiring staff to search email for meeting codes, shared file links and conversations, everything can be organised in context.

Use Channels

Use Channels to separate information types – this keeps resources and conversations in context 

Channels could include:

  • Announcements
  • Meetings (video)
  • Daily Briefings
  • Teacher only channel
  • All Staff informal channel
  • Staff wellbeing
  • Professional Development
  • Social Club

Channel Settings – Control Posts and Replies

Channel settings can be changed to manage who can Post to a Channel.
This is useful in an Announcements Channel where leadership only can Post.

In the screenshot you can see that only Team Owners can Post and members can Reply.

Channel Settings – Create a Private Channel

Channels can also be set as Private when created.

This is useful where a group of Staff (eg. Teachers) can have a private space for their particular group.

In the screenshot the Teacher Office channel could be set as Private for Teachers to access for Teaching related work

Connect your SharePoint Portal

Schools using SharePoint Portals can easily connect Portal Document Libraries into their Microsoft Team

In the screenshot a Tab has been added on the top menu linking to the Teams Resources document library on a SharePoint School Portal. This tab makes those files available from the Team.

 

A Single Collaborative Space

Microsoft Teams provides that single collaborative space for your staff to work in and communicate in.  You can even bring external meeting participants from outside your organisation to a video meeting fr professional development sessions.

How to solve – OneDrive Folders Synced but Status shows Syncing

How to solve – OneDrive Folders Synced but Status shows Syncing

by | Jul 25, 2019 | Office 365, OneDrive

I’ve just had a Staff member move all her documents to OneDrive for Business, install the Mobile App, accessed from File Explorer and from her web browser.  She loves it – no more clunky VPN to access files on our server. #winning

BUT – she experienced an issue where OneDrive told her all her files were up-to-date, but some of the Folders in File Explorer continued to show the Status of syncing. Annoying – Yes. Casting doubt on the whole syncing situation – Yes. We had to resolve this.

Naturally we searched for solutions – found and tried several, until the following one worked for us.  Thanks to a solution provided by David Lodge here – we were able to delete the hidden temporary files which were causing the friction for her.

Some hidden temporary files in those OneDrive folders were causing File Explorer to display the Syncing status – my assumption is that those temp files weren’t being synced to the cloud – because the staff member was looking at her documents and comparing she could see her files in the cloud and in File Explorer.

How to solve – OneDrive Folders Synced but Status shows Syncing

The solution was to change File Explorer Folder Options view settings so those hidden temporary and system files could be seen and removed.

How to Temporarily change the Folder view options as follows (Windows 10):

  1. In File Explorer ribbon click: View Tab > Options > Change folder and search options

    Onedrive file explorer still syncing

  2. In the Folder options window open the View Tab

  3. Select the radio button for “Show hidden files, folders, and drives“

  4. Uncheck the box that shows “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)“
  5. Click OK
  6. Browse through each folder still syncing in File Explorer and remove all locked/corrupted temp files and the folder will show as synced
  7. Reverse the folder options selected above when done. 

While this may not be what’s causing your issue, I know we tried a number of things which didn’t work for us including:

  • pausing and restarting the OneDrive sync
  • renaming the folder
  • restarting the computer
  • running Windows updates

Hope that’s helpful and David Lodge if you were in Cairns I’d buy you a beer!

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How to Create a Keyboard Shortcut to Insert the Windows Key Symbol

How to Create a Keyboard Shortcut to Insert the Windows Key Symbol

by | Jul 16, 2019 | Office 365, Windows

As a software consultant and trainer I am regularly creating content to help staff make use of the digital tools that they have available to them.

As we roll out Office 365 to our education staff I have been creating a number of documents supporting the use of Office 365 digital tools and wanted to add the Windows symbol for the Windows key instead of constantly typing out “use the Windows key + D to…….”.

Here’s how you can setup a keyboard shortcut to insert the Window’s Key Symbol into your documents.  (If only it was an emoji…. I could use Windows Key + .     to insert it here…..)

How to Create a Keyboard Shortcut for the Windows Key Symbol

The Windows Key Symbol is actually a character in the font – HoloLens MDL2 Assets – so to insert that character into your document you need to start by clicking the Insert Symbol icon on the Word Ribbon and select More Symbols

Insert Windows Key symbol

The fonts window will open – change the font to HoloLens MDL2 Assets and click the Windows symbol like shown below

insert windows key symbol

To create a Keyboard Shortcut to use whenever you want to insert the Windows symbol you select click the Shortcut Key Button, thern assign a key combination – in the image below you can see I have selected the ALT key in combination with the W key, so I hold down ALT and tap W and the Windows symbol is inserted into my document.

Windows Key shortcut symbol

For me it would be really helpful if the Windows symbol was available as a symbol in the emoji library – that way I could use the key combination – WIN key + . – and insert the Windows symbol in other applications…… like this webpage!

 

 

Microsoft Teams – Change the Name of your Free Organisation

Microsoft Teams – Change the Name of your Free Organisation

by | Jul 2, 2019 | Office 365, Teams

Microsoft offers limited free access to Microsoft Teams.  Yep, you can setup Teams as an organisation for free and at the moment add up to 300 Members including yourself to Teams.

I went ahead and did this, rushed through the setup just to see if it was true……… and then a few weeks later realised that the name of the Organisation I used was not what I wanted to run with.

If you ended up in the same spot as me – here’s how I was able to change the name of the Teams Organisation.

  1. login to http://account.activedirectory.windowsazure.com/
  2. use the Office 365 account used to setup Teams
  3. click the profile picture top right and make a note of the “admin@[yourdomain].onmicrosoft.com” login address (pity you cant copy it)
  4. use that address and login to https://portal.office.com (I had to reset my password)
  5. click the Admin icon
    Change Teams organization name free
  6. Login again using the “admin@[yourdomain].onmicrosoft.com” login address
  7. click the Show All link
  8. click Settings and Organization Profile
  9. Next to Organization Profile click Edit and complete the form – remember to click the Save button

There you go!  If that was helpful Tweet this for someone else!  🙂

 

 

How Microsoft Teams is improving the quality of our email

How Microsoft Teams is improving the quality of our email

by | Jun 22, 2019 | Office 365, Teams

Microsoft Teams Adoption

We recently rolled out Microsoft Teams to Staff in the support office of our organisation, Catholic Education Cairns. Our senior leaders made the decision to go with Office 365 as our single Collaborative Platform to reduce some of the friction that existed when we had a multitude of document storage spaces and document creation tools, without the advantages of strong collaborative features.

It has only been 9 weeks since we setup Staff computers and mobiles with Microsoft Teams, informally introduced the features of Teams and introduced staff to Team’s Chat and Team’s Conversations.

We could see the potential that Teams would make to staff working collaboratively and knew staff would appreciate the change to a single platform for document sharing.  But I didn’t expect such a positive response to Microsoft Team’s Chat and Conversation features from Staff who had been entrenched in email and document storage spaces.

Microsoft Teams Chat and Conversations

Since moving our support Office staff to Microsoft Teams two months ago we have seen a 300% increase in Microsoft Team’s Chat traffic, and a 100% increase in our Microsoft Team’s Conversations messages.  This prompted me to seek some anecdotal feedback from staff in our office on what differences they had noticed so far.

Staff say they are increasingly using Chat for internal communications instead of email and that the number of emails they are getting has reduced because of that. But the significant advantage – win! – is that the overall quality of email has increased.  Because Microsoft Team’s Chat takes care of the short email conversations they used to have in their email, their Inbox is reduced of clutter and long email threaded conversations.  So the overall Quality of their email has improved.

In the same way Microsoft Team’s Conversations has supported improving email quality.  Staff communicating in Team Conversations can see other staff responses to a conversation in context – not by scrolling past a dozen or more emails (and email signatures!) to get the conversation. Staff find it easier to “make sense of the conversation” because everyone’s replies or reactions are right there in the Teams Conversation.  “You can so easily see who has responded and how they have responded. It’s soooooo much easier”, one staff member commented.  The traditional “email to all reply to all – maybe” poor communication practice is starting to fade out.

Enhanced Communication and Collaboration Experience

In Teams conversations staff are also making good use of the emoji responses.  Simple clicks to indicate they have read a Conversation or Reply have helped people work smarter, simpler and with a bit more fun. Being able to express a bit of personality into a message using a Sticker, GIF or emoji has enhanced our conversations.

It’s really satisfying to see new digital tools being able to support staff in their work – actually making a noticeable difference that they can experience rather than just replacing one tool with another. We are a collaborative organisation by nature, it’s in our DNA, and Microsoft Teams is a digital tool which is enabling our collaboration much more effectively to help us work simpler, smarter and smoother.

 

What is Microsoft Teams?