Webinar: Running Effective Projects in Office 365 September 2015

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Many organizations create project site templates to manage their projects in SharePoint, either online or on premises. However SharePoint is only part of the equation when it comes to collaborating effectively on projects. Office 365 Groups attempt to go further with that, but end up scaling back on what you can do in SharePoint. We've blended the best of both together. To start with we'll:

• Discuss the appropriate tools to use for different parts of the collaboration story
• SharePoint of course is ideal for documents, but also structured lists like tasks, issues, risks, or decisions, and unstructured content like Wikis
• Conversations related to the project can be managed in either Office 365 Groups or Yammer, either of which can be embedded right in the SharePoint project site. Groups have the advantage of also being regular email threads that can include external people
• Exchange is another important piece. While you can do calendars in SharePoint, people tend to live in Outlook, and being able to invite the project to meetings just like all the other attendees is easily achieved with Office 365 Groups in Exchange
• Delve provides knowledge discovery across all of these tools
• Extranet User Manager allows you to invite external users to participate
• Nintex Forms and Workflows helps glue it all together

Next we'll move on to some of the enhancements that can be done.

• While embedding Yammer is easy, embedding the Office 365 conversations and calendar is a little trickier
• We’ll show how a little custom presentation code can leverage the OOTB Exchange REST APIs to display the calendar and conversations right in the project site
• Demonstrate further enhancements, such as a single click link from the calendar to create a populated meeting minutes document in SharePoint
• Provide external access for collaboration with the Extranet User Manager

Lastly we’ll talk about site creation.

• While all the elements can be manually created and configured, it is much better to script this into a single process
• A project request form can then go through a workflow process to trigger the creation of new project sites once approved
• The form and workflow can be built with Out of the Box SharePoint lists and workflows, or leverage Nintex Forms and Workflow for Office 365

Learn More

See the related webinar September 16 on External Collaboration with Office 365 Project Sites.

Catch this webinar in person at the TSPUG meeting on September 16 from 6:00 to 8:30 PM.

Want More Office 365?

Review sessions you may have missed:

• June 11th: Office 365 - The Future is Now
• June 16th: Office 365 Information Architecture and Migration
• June 24th: Office 365 Experience, Branding and Navigation