You’ve created an amazing PowerPoint deck.  You’ve presented.  It’s well received.  People are asking for copies of it.  But its 200MB and you cannot easily get it to them.  Here is how you can reduce the file size of your PowerPoint deck.

1.Open File Explorer and locate the deck.

2. Make a copy of it.

3. Rename the Powerpoint_File.pptx to a .zip file by right clicking the file and changing the extension (to do so, make sure you can view file name extensions – View, Show, ensure File Name Extensions is checked)

4. Now open the zip file.  All assets in your PowerPoint deck are now located here in a folder structure.  The most likely culprit of large files is in the ppt/media sub-folder.

5. Sort the files in this folder by size.

6. Start with the largest asset, and its most likely a high-resolution photo. Open that photo and make note of what the photo is.

7. Now open the original Powerpoint presentation you made a copy of earlier and find the slide with that photo on it.

8. Highlight / select the photo in the slide.  You will know you selected the correct object when the “Photo Format” menu items appear in your menu bar

9. Select Picture Format, then Compress Picture

10. Reduce the Resolution of the photo to “Print” or to “Web”.  This will significantly decrease the size of the photo storage used, but you’re not likely to see a visual reduction in quality, unless you are sharing on a giant screen.

11. Save the document if Auto-Save is not turned on.

12. In file explorer, refresh the view showing the original PowerPoint to recalculate the size of the doc.

13. Repeat from step 6 on with each newly largest photo in the zip file until you reach a more manageable size PowerPoint presentation.

A couple things to note here:

• In step 10, you may reduce the quality of all photos in the PowerPoint presentation, by deselecting “Apply only to this Picture”, but it is recommended to be more selective by choosing the photos you want to reduce, rather than assuming all.
• If you are using techniques with the morph transition and the same photo on two or more consecutive slides, and you leave the “Delete cropped areas of pictures”, the morph may not function as intended, so be careful with this.

And just like that, now you know how to reduce the file size of your PowerPoint deck like a pro.

Looking for more help with PowerPoint, Outlook, or Office 365? Contact us today.

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We know that Microsoft Teams has us covered when working remotely.  However, some really had to go back to office, some are planning to go back, and others may never go back.  In this post, I want to share some creative ways of utilizing Office 365 to make heading back to the office safe and less stressful.

What can you expect when you get back to your office?  I have been to a number of customer sites and have seen some creative measures. Being an outside visitor, it is often tough to pick up on all the rules and procedures. 

Kind of like missing the one-way stickers on the floor of the grocery store and having someone give you the stink eye, at least the first couple times.  The list of processes and procedures can be quite daunting for those who need to comply as well as those who need to educate everybody else for our collective safety. Consider an ever-growing list with these below to name a few:

• New forms and surveys required for building access
• New temperature stations
• Mask requirements
• Social distancing in open spaces
• In-office traffic patterns
• Conference room occupation and configurations
• Open desk hoteling
• Hand sanitation
• Ingress and egress procedures
• Proper etiquette with respect to plexiglass dividers and shields
• End of day cleaning procedures
• Clean and used pen receptacles

Enter our first Office 365 solution, SharePoint Spaces. 

Microsoft’s web-based, immersive platform which allows you to create and share, extensible virtual reality experiences. 

In short, you can take a 360-degree tour of your facility enhanced with forms, links, documents, and videos.  Keep an eye out for a blog post by our SharePoint master, Jim Sottosanto where he will give you more on SharePoint Spaces.   If a picture is worth a thousand words, an immersive experience is infinitely useful with such a huge “WOW” factor. 

Everyone is trying to go as touchless as possible.  I have had to fill out quite a few questionnaires, many times hard copies with pen clean and used pen cups.  I have been interviewed by a few security guards behind a sneeze shield.  Other times, I have forms emailed to me which I have had to sign and email back before arrival. 

Skip those processes; there’s a better way for your company. Enter Microsoft Forms. 

One of the better solutions I have seen is the QRC code that takes you to a Microsoft Form.  Use your mobile device to scan the code to fill out the form and you have real time data especially when you pair that with a temperature check. No paper, no pens – the only thing you touch is the phone you have on you.

Now that we’ve gotten ourselves in the door, we know where to go because we have already taken the virtual tour in SharePoint Spaces.  Just as important, I have a distanced and reserved space waiting for me.

One of the more impressive measures I have seen a company undertake to bring essential personnel back to the office and give them safe space was to make all huddle and small conference rooms a single person space. 

They also configured their open hoteling space to create open desks that could be reserved and distanced strategically to create social distancing.    They wanted to go the extra measures to only allow one person to reserve that space for the day, and send reminder emails to make sure employees filled out the survey on the day they were to arrive and before they entered the building.  

Welcome our next Office 365 solution, Microsoft Bookings.

Of course, the Exchange room resource accounts existed for the conference rooms but there is no good way to enforce a default to an all-day meeting. 

Creating a service and having that service mapped to a staff member that was a room resource ticked a lot of the boxes. We added the open desks as room resources and selected the service configuration boxes as required.  Here a few that made this a quick solution:

• Default location
• Default duration (full day)
• Buffer times (for cleaning)
• Maximum Attendees (1)
• Custom Fields
• Reminders and Confirmations (Additional Email Information for sending a Forms link)
• Send an Invite to the customer

A creative way to use bookings for sure. Thanks to my teammate for the suggestion in our weekly team meeting held, of course, in Microsoft Teams.

Our Office 365 hero solution, Microsoft Teams

Coupled with Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR), Teams has enabled people to collaborate no matter where they are.  We know that Microsoft Teams is enabling our remote workforce but let us look at what it is doing for the headed back to the office users. 

Not every company is going to be able to limit rooms to one occupant.  I have installed MTRs where chairs have been removed and/or painters tape is used on the table to identify spacing, all in effort to limit the people in the room. 

What you may not know is that a Microsoft Teams Room can detect how many people are in the room and post a notification to the screen that the recommended number of people has been exceeded.

Couple that with the ability to do touchless join achieved by either joining the room from your personal device or by calling Cortana to action.  Add in a few more features like automatic meeting end and wireless casting.  It is clear to see Microsoft is innovating for all our wellbeing.

You can see more with Microsoft’s meetings reimagined post here.

Hopefully, I did not paint myself as a hapless wanderer during this time of quarantines.  I want to thank all those who opened their doors to us so that we could assist in making your offices safer for the back to work efforts. 

I appreciate all that organizations have done to keep me safe.  We at Magenium have our own safety protocols to follow when going on site and we are only going on site when required or prudent.  There are a lot of empty offices and it is turning out to be a good time to get prepared for the return to the office while no one is there.  Stay safe!

If you’re interested in getting started with any of these technologies, contact us below. 

The post Heading Back to a Hybrid Office (365 Style) appeared first on Magenium.

Last Wednesday, Microsoft asked 50,000 Seattle-area employees to stay home and use Microsoft Teams if they could, and most complied overnight. By the end of the next day, chat on Teams was up 50 percent week over week and Teams meetings were up 37 percent.

Clearly, Microsoft has created a product that enables people to be connected and productive no matter where they physically reside.

Our Experience With Teams

Here at Magenium we have spent the last 3 years deploying Microsoft Teams and Teams Room conferencing systems at companies of all sizes. We’ve learned that by enabling Teams, these organizations combine chat, video calls, telephone, file collaboration and more to reduce the back and forth of email and improve productivity.

We have also learned that deploying Teams is more complex than simply enabling the application in Office 365. The application is extremely powerful but there are considerations that need to be made with regard to internal and external networking, workflows, personas, and use cases.  Magenium can get you up and running quickly.

Pandemic preparation requires an alternate worksite. Prepare for it now and for your future to ensure your business will survive and thrive. We are ready, willing, and able. Let’s get started. Contact us below.

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In case you have not heard the news, on July 30, 2019 Microsoft announced that Skype for Business will be retiring on July 31, 2021. Once this date passes Skype for Business will no longer be accessible for its users. In addition to this, starting on the 1^st of September 2019 new Office 365 customers will be introduced to the use of Microsoft Teams instead of Skype for Business. Microsoft made this announcement so that you can be prepared not only for the future, but so that you can look for possible alternative solutions.Thankfully there is an easy solution for you: Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams combines video, chatting, calling, and document collaboration all in one place. You and your colleagues can now communicate with each other in not just multiple different ways, but you can also communicate in multiple different locations. This is possible since Microsoft Teams works at your desktop or on the go through your mobile device. Microsoft Teams aims to help you and your business communicate and collaborate better than Skype for Business.

As a business that previously used Skype for Business, we understand the hesitation in changing to a new platform. However, we have migrated to Microsoft Teams and have found that it makes our work environment more unified and connected. We recommend that you and your company make the switch to Microsoft Teams and we want to help you ease into the transition. As a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, we would love to talk to you about helping your company migrate to Microsoft Teams before the end of Skype for Business. We want to help take the hassle out of making the switch help you every step of the way. Magenium Solutions is equipped and qualified to help you and your business make the jump from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Feel free to reach out to us to talk about how you and your business can make the switch, so that it is not the end of the world when Skype for Business retires next year.

The post It’s the End of Skype for Business as We Know it appeared first on Magenium.

Recently during a Teams deployment, I came across an interesting bug. External users & dial-in users were not being automatically admitted into the meeting, even though the global settings had been applied for them to do so (see screenshot below).  They were having to be manually admitted into the meeting, by a participant who was already in the meeting.

We were able to rectify this issue by creating a new Meeting Policy via PowerShell and assigning that policy to all the users: 

New-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "No Lobby" -AutoAdmittedUsers Everyone

To assign the policy to individual users:

Grant-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -PolicyName 'No Lobby” -Identity "user@contoso.com"

To assign the policy to all users in the organization: 

Get-CsOnlineUser | %{Grant-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -policyname "No Lobby" -Identity $_.UserPrincipalName} 

Please note: these settings will only be applied to new or updated meetings.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Teams best practices? Contact us below.

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Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending Communications vNext in Denver, a conference focused solely on Microsoft Unified Communications technologies. What follows are my experiences and hopefully something everyone can learn from!  

How did I Discover This Conference?

This conference was in its “Beta” year and did not come with the hype of other conferences (Ignite, Enterprise Connect). I am an active participant in a few Skype and Teams groups on LinkedIn and saw that a few key community members had shared details to an event that looked promising. As soon as I heard that they would be focusing solely on Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams, I knew I had to attend. It also did not hurt that they decided to make the “Beta” free!

My Experience

After the schedule was released with the speakers, I knew that this event was going to be the real deal. The legendary Jamie Stark (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft) gave an introductory keynote on Microsoft’s Intelligent Communication vision. He discussed at a high level the iterations of Office Communications Server, Lync, and Skype for Business. Jamie went on to describe the journey into Microsoft Teams and the excitement about how it is truly a whole new product and not just an “upgrade” of Skype for Business. After the keynote, we had the opportunity to attend the sessions that most interested us.

My first session I chose to attend was titled “Cradle to Grave” of a Microsoft Team. The session was presented by Heidi Gloudemans (Director – Teams Strategic Customer Engagement, Microsoft). This turned out to be one of the most structured sessions. Heidi presented a demo Teams environment and walked us through the “Teams Lifecycle”. She showcased the different functionalities that may not be that evident on the surface. Some of these may surprise you and should prove to be incredibly useful, such as:

• 200 Channels per Team limit
• Naming Convention Templates
  • Custom Blocked Words
  • Prefix / Suffix Naming Requirements
• Expiration Policies (Azure P1)

The next session I attended was “Get the Latest on Skype to Teams Journey Strategies and Experiences” presented by Nick Smith (Principal Program Manager, Microsoft). This session provided tons of information on the Journey to Microsoft Teams. Nick drilled down the different coexistence modes:

• Skype with Teams collaboration-only mode
  • Great way to introduce Teams in your environment while continuing to leverage your existing Skype for Business
• Skype with Teams collaboration and meetings mode
  • Option to utilize Teams for meetings, but provide the business Skype Enterprise Voice capabilities
• Islands mode (Default)
  • Teams users can utilize Teams with full capabilities with other Teams users
  • Other users can continue to utilize Skype for Business with no business impact
• Teams-only mode
  • Teams client becomes the primary communication and collaboration tool
  • Skype for Business client can be used to join existing Skype meetings (Internal and External)
• Skype-only mode

These coexistence modes enable you to manage which modalities in Skype and Teams are available to your users. Each coexistence mode may be an option, depending upon the customer and their needs.

He detailed the current interop features not available and ended his session with a very busy Q&A.

The third session I attended was “Voice Routing in Microsoft Teams” by Doug Lawty (Voice Technology Solutions Profession, Microsoft). Doug constructed his presentation by going through the “Call Lifecycle” which consisted of: Get Service, Provision Routing, Pre-Call, Sign-In, Call, and Post-Call. He dove into each category. He also explained at a high level the capabilities of routing select calls to Session Border Controller (SBC).

The final session of the day I attended was “Bring Your Own Trunk and the SBC’s role” by Jens Madsen. Jens went through the evolution of Bring Your Own Trunk (Hybrid, CCE, Teams Direct Routing). Jens covered many “gotchas” and best-practices when Direct Routing SBC’s with 3^rd Parties. Some of the topics covered were:

• SILK and OPUS Audio Codec
• Direct Routing SBCs
  • 3^rd Party
  • Legacy Devices
• Opening SBC to the internet (Teams)
  • Bidirectional connectivity to communicate with the cloud services for signaling and media
  • Connection Points for Direct Routing
    • sip.pstnhub.microsoft.com
    • sip2.pstnhub.microsoft.com
    • sip3.pstnhub.microsoft.com

Final Takeaway

First of all, hats off to the Communications vNext organizers (Pat Richard, Jonathan McKinney, Adam Bell, and Josh Blalock) for putting together a conference for our Unified Communications community that zeroed in on all things Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.

For being in its “Beta” the Comms vNext conference was great. It featured Microsoft speakers, thought leaders, Microsoft UC partners, and community. The conference provided ample networking opportunities with customers and partners. I definitely plan on attending Comms vNext in 2019!

If you or your organization is looking for help with your Unified Communications strategy, feel free to contact us at info@magenium.com

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If information is power, then collaboration is power squared.

Collaboration allows your employees to take advantage of group knowledge. It drives productivity by putting tools, data, and documents all within easy reach of your teams. But how and where does this collaboration occur? Collaboration is delivered through easy-to-use portals that propel your business success. With secure, accessible portals, your clients and employees can easily share data and information.

The Improved SharePoint Employee Experience

Gone are the days of being a mere document repository; Microsoft SharePoint is now infinitely customizable. It can be custom-designed, coded, and deployed specifically to meet the needs of your business and its teams.

You can easily create intranets, team sites, and even individual employee sites. Your employees can "follow" sites and colleague activity directly within SharePoint. For greater flexibility, the application allows your team to organize and collaborate on the same documents in real time at the same time.

Better Data Collection All In One Place

Many businesses have concerns about remote access and compliance. At Magenium, we’ve helped companies faced with the dilemma of “content sprawl.” That occurs when documents and resources are not centralized or easy to access. This problem wastes the time and efforts of your employees and runs counter to the problem these platforms were meant to solve. Fortunately, SharePoint’s document organization ability resolves this critical problem, as well as enables your company to quickly locate and hold documents during critical business or regulatory events.

Security in the Cloud and Over Mobile Devices Built on SharePoint Tech

Portals work well inside the confines of your on-premise infrastructure. But what happens when your employees, vendors, or customers need access from anywhere using their mobile devices? As you shift data to the cloud, Magenium helps you protect and organize sensitive data, but also enables secure and controlled access to your business data from virtually any mobile device from anywhere. You’ll have the ability to invite users to share documents both inside and outside your company using OneDrive for Business. This personalized, secure online document library for users is built on SharePoint technology within Office 365.

We are a Microsoft Certified Partner for portals and collaboration with recognized expertise in collaboration tools. If you want to explore the power of collaboration using SharePoint, please contact us or call +1 (630) 786-5900.

The post The Power of the Portal to Link You, Your Employees, and Your Clients appeared first on Magenium.

The Skype for Business Android app is now available. Users who were already using Lync have been automatically updated to the new app that also fixes the problem of syncing Lync 2013 with Office 365. The app now brings you Skype meetings, presence, instant messaging, voice, and video through a simplified interface on your Android device.

To access this app, you’ll need a device running Android OS 4.0 or later. You can download the app from the Google Play store. If you already had the Lync 2013 mobile app installed, the new Skype for Business app replaced it automatically. This applies to both phones and tablets running Android OS 4.0 or later.

Some of the key functions now available include the following:

• Start a group IM or video conversation. You can invite additional participants right from the app.
• You can join or initiate a Skype for Business meeting. This helps you communicate and collaborate with your team in real time.
• Share your video and view speaker’s video during a conference.
• You can control a meeting from your device, meaning you can mute or remove attendees.
• You can see upcoming meetings inside the app and join them easily.
• You can see your recent conversations (no matter what device they were initiated on) and pick them up right where you left off.
• With the app, you can search contacts by name, email, or phone number.
• This app offers enhanced security via Active Directory Authentication Library 

One of Microsoft’s goals for the app was to make contact management significantly better. Users can search their address list in the contact search bar by name, email, or phone number.

A recent update made content viewing available on Android. Within the app, you can view a presenter’s desktop and applications that are shared in a meeting. When viewing this content, the meeting controls disappear to help you focus. With a light screen tap, you can bring back the controls if needed.

Want the nitty-gritty details? You can download a full productivity guide here to make sure you get the most out of Skype for Business for Android. And if you’re a developer, check out this video describing the Skype for Business SDK. 

If you want to explore how Skype for Business for Android can improve your enterprise collaboration and productivity, please contact us or call +1 (630) 786-5900.

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Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Microsoft, studied potential total economic impact (TEI) and return on investment (ROI) for companies using Microsoft Office 365. The goal was to provide SMBs a framework to use to evaluate the financial impact of Office 365 on their businesses.

Forrester interviewed four companies and surveyed 204 companies, all of whom had used or were using Office 365. Read the full study here. The data shown represents benefits to a composite organization. The composite was composed of the average experience of the companies gleaned from the interviews and surveys:

• Improved business continuity, avoiding lost billable hours totaling $15,000 annually. In short, the business was no longer disrupted by server or infrastructure issues. Hardware problems were avoided by using SaaS.
• Avoided $18,000 of hardware upgrades. Employees could use their own equipment and use older equipment because Office 365 works with older devices.
• Eliminated $8,100 of annual costs for third-party software and services. Most businesses had a combination of licenses before switching to Office 365. The switch allowed one license for all the business applications that they used.
• Reduced IT support effort by 19 percent. Because Office 365 operates in the cloud and most businesses choose a partner to oversee it, this allowed IT to reduce their support efforts.
• Improved mobile worker productivity, saving 45 hours per mobile worker. The ability to access, share, and sync files on the road saved each mobile worker 15 minutes per day. This particularly helped those who worked in sales and consulting.
• Redefined workspace, allowing employees to work from anywhere in the world with an internet connection or cell service. Workers can access Office 365 on up to 6 devices, keeping them better connected than ever from anywhere they happen to be.
• Reduced security, risk, and compliance costs by $4,929 over three years. Those interviewed saw value in the Microsoft brand and its trustworthiness with security concerns.
• Better collaboration, all while seeing improved partitioning of sensitive information. Customers reported the ability to collaborate easier. The ability to create permissions and silo sensitive information was seen as a key benefit.

Each business has to weigh the costs and benefits of Office 365 for themselves, but the study reveals many use cases where use of Office 365 pays off. Do you want to discover if Microsoft Office 365 is right for your business? Please contact us or call +1 (630) 786-5900 to arrange a demo.  

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We all know Office 365 is an incredibly powerful productivity tool for large and small organizations alike, but did you know that certain Office 365 plans come with a free subscription to yet another powerful Microsoft tool?

Paid subscriptions to Microsoft Office 365 come with a free (simple) subscription to Microsoft Azure Active Directory. This powers the Office 365 directory service on the back end. It may not be immediately apparent to many users, but it's quite simple — add a user in the Office 365 admin interface, and you'll see it in Azure AD.  It's easy to access a connected Azure AD account — all the admin has to do is sign up for an Azure account with the admin's user ID, and they'll be linked.

Once the setup is complete, clicking the "Azure AD" link in Office 365 Admin will fire up the Azure console where you can manage it. I'm excited to talk more about additional features of Azure AD, but I'll save it for future posts. For now, here's a helpful link on how to register for your Azure Active Directory subscription.

So, back to the topic at hand. It's likely that even if you're brand new to Office 365, you've seen this screen above. This is the Microsoft standard login screen for Office 365. While nice and professional looking, wouldn't it be swell to have something a little more personal? Something connected to your brand identity or your mission? Or, something fun? Here's how to do it.

Above, you'll see the Azure Active Directory console for my personal lab, in which I have an Enterprise E1 license. Once you've clicked on your Active Directory for your Office 365 instance (which should already be there) here's what you need to do. Click on the "Configure" tab at the top, and then the green "Customize Branding" button.

You'll be presented with a popup box where various options can be configured. In this simple example, I've uploaded a banner logo and a sign in page illustration. The "?" icons next to each box explains in more detail what each options does. I'd like to see previews on this page, but perhaps MS will add that in the future — for now, the only way to do this is to make the change and check out how it looks. Fortunately, it's easy to revert if needed.

Once the changes are saved, there's a few ways that the design handiwork can be viewed. The first way is to access the standard Office 365 login screen and type your organization's email into the first box. The page will refresh with the custom branding you have applied.

The second way is to use a custom URL. This URL uses a pattern like this:

https://login.microsoftonline.com/?whr=yourdomain.com

Using that second URL will take users directly to the custom branded login page for your organization. I recommend using an approved corporate logo as well as a professional, vibrant image that captures the spirit of your company.

Find more entries on Peter Redmer’s blog at peterredmer.info
 

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