New software is not always intuitive to every employee. Although the fast pace of technology upgrades and releases provide end-users with better ways to work efficiently and effectively, if they don’t know how to take advantage of the new features and functionality, frustration and wasted time will be the result. Productivity sometimes needs a little push.

Vitalyst can help. We have managed thousands of migrations and provide employee software coaching and training support to hundreds of organizations and over a million end-users every day.

Office 2013 can make a dramatic impact on your organization. Make it a positive one with Vitalyst.

WHAT’S NEW IN OFFICE 365/2013

The key theme when it comes to new features in Office 365/2013 is that Microsoft applications are now heavily integrated, particularly with SharePoint. Users have to not only be able to navigate Word, Excel, PowerPoint as they have for years but they also need to be able to utilize collaboration features in SharePoint, OneDrive, Skype and OneNote. Some key changes in Office 365 are:

• Stream Office programs to another computer. Utilize Office on smartphones and tablets.

• Save files to OneDrive for easy access and sharing.

• OneNote is now fully included in the office package and integrated into Office products. This will generate questions about this newer, more accessible application and how to use features like syncing

OneNote directly to OneDrive to provide a greater degree of collaboration.

• Templates and macros across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access will need to be remediated for formatting flaws, particularly if the original templates were built in 2007 or earlier.

Productivity in the Cloud with Office 365/2013

SHAREPOINT 2013

A new UI interfaceSimilar to the ribbon upgrade of 2007 but with certain functions removed, new functions added, and general changes to how functions are accessed in SharePoint.

Social FeaturesAs with earlier versions of SharePoint, each user has a profile and a personal site (or “My Site”). SharePoint Server 2013 has now been reorganized into three distinct hubs: Newsfeed, OneDrive, and Sites. These hubs are available in a global navigation bar, and the social features associated with My Sites are fully integrated into the SharePoint experience. It’s no longer necessary to visit your My Site in a web browser to access social features.

SharePoint Newsfeed appLets you use your SharePoint newsfeed from your Windows Phone, iPhone, or iPad. You can see updates to all the newsfeeds you’re following, post messages, and star t following people, documents, sites, and tags.

More ways to shareYou can now store personal documents in a single, personal library, accessible from anywhere — your OneDrive for Business. This takes the place of sorting documents into either “Shared Documents” or “Private Documents.” All documents in the library are initially private until you decide to share them.

> Use the new Share command to quickly share documents or sites. You can invite people to share specific documents and control what they can do with them (read, write, and so on). You can also use the Share control to:

• Share a document or site with a select group of people through a “selective people” link. Quickly find out who’s sharing a document or site.

• Send a personalized email invitation when you share a document or site.

• Receive aler ts in your newsfeed whenever a document gets updated.

> You can also use your mobile device to share a document or folder in a library.

Community SitesSharePoint 2013 expands on the discussion concept by introducing Community Sites, which are site collections built using the brand new Community Site template.

> The availability of all Community Site content to all members of the community.

> Full retention of discussion history in compliance with corporate governance guidelines.

> Built-in search, which enables members to search all content in the community.

> Ratings enable members to vote on individual posts and replies and contribute to the reputation of community members.

> An achievement system that rewards members for participation in the community.

> Categorization of content to improve discoverability and simplify maintenance.

> Site maintenance via SharePoint lists, which provide a familiar interface and enable you to take advantage of the rich governance, records management, and workflow integration features of SharePoint.

OneNote IntegrationNow, when you create a team site, a OneNote shared notebook is automatically created as part of the site. You can use this notebook to capture, compile, and share information.

> The shared notebook inherits the team site’s permissions.

> You can embed documents into notebook pages. These embedded documents are automatically stored as separate files in a document library, so you can manage and share them just like other documents you store in SharePoint.

Managing Videos> In addition to displaying a video on a standard page,

each video uploaded to a SharePoint site will have its own player page that contains metadata about the video.

> Video sets enable you to manage different renditions of each video that could span different resolutions, encoding formats, and slightly modified video content (for example, audio dubbed in different languages). SharePoint manages which encoding is played depending on the capability of your browser and device.

> Embedding of video sources external to SharePoint (like YouTube) is also supported.

Sync Document LibrariesUse OneDrive for Business, to synchronize document libraries with folders in your Windows file system. OneDrive for Business provides access to documents when offline and automatically syncs updates to the server when you go back online.

TasksSee a timeline of your current tasks, including tasks assigned to you in SharePoint, and tasks you entered in other applications such as Outlook that are sent to SharePoint via Exchange. Create new tasks and use views to filter tasks. For example, see which tasks are active, completed, or coming due.

Project SitesEnable people in an organization to effectively collaborate on lightweight projects. Project managers can quickly get a sense of what’s going on in a project, and team members can quickly see how their work fits into the overall context. Project sites also enable teams to access and share relevant data, documents, and communication. A project site provides the following:

> Project Summary Web Part.

> Visual timeline of the project’s tasks.

> Project task schedule.

> Library for storing relevant project documents.

> Notebook for quickly capturing and organizing information about the project.

> Shared calendar for team events.

> Ability to connect to the Project Server 2013 application.

Connect To External Data Using OData Providers In ExcelIn Microsoft Excel 2013, you can connect to external data using a variety of connections, including OData providers. Some data connections, including OData data connections, are supported in Excel Services. This enables you to create reports, scorecards, and dashboards that can be refreshed to display the most up-to-date information.

SHAREPOINT 2013

Enhanced Business Intelligence Features> New data navigation features, such as Quick Explore,

make it easier to drill into data displayed in Excel Services reports and dashboards. Select a value, and then use Quick Explore to see the next level of detail that you want to see in the report.

> Formattable slicers and Timeline controls render in a browser window much like they do in the Excel client.

> The ability to open and use the Fields list for a PivotTable report or PivotChart report enables you to add, change, or remove items from a view. You can focus on the information that you want to see without having to open the Excel client.

> Choose between worksheet view or gallery view when publishing workbooks. You can display an entire worksheet in a browser window, or display content so that one report at a time is featured in the center of the screen.

> You can view and interact with PowerPivot and Power View content in a browser window

View BI content on Mobile DevicesYou can now view certain kinds of dashboard content, including PerformancePoint Web Parts, and Excel Services reports on mobile devices such as a Windows 8 tablet or an Apple iPad.

Web Content Authoring> Site owners and designers can now customize the global

and current navigation menus by dragging menu items directly onto the page.

> A new video content type adds many new features for using videos on pages. The video upload process is simplified for content authors. Thumbnail preview images are now created automatically when a video is uploaded to an asset library and content authors can pick a frame from within the video to use as the thumbnail preview image.

Site CustomizationSharePoint Server 2013 offers a new theming experience that guides you through a quick process to change the look of your site and make it unique. You can choose among multiple options of color, font, site layout, and available background images or your own.

New Design MasterIf you need to completely redesign a site from scratch or reuse a previous design of yours, you can use the Design Manager, which lets you modify master pages, page layouts, mobile views, and more. This feature is especially useful for advanced site design and branding to your public-facing website or your internal site collection or portal.

Configure Sites for Mobile DevicesProductivity doesn’t have to stop as long as you have an Internet-connected mobile device. Depending on the complexity of your site you can implement SharePoint features that are designed to optimize your mobile viewing experience. If a mobile browser supports HTML 5, your site can display in a contemporary view. You can set alerts to get notified about changes to your site. Device channels facilitate content creation for publishing sites by showing different content on different device channels using the same page and page layout.

WorkflowsSharePoint Designer 2013 includes major improvements to the experience of designing workflows and modeling more complex business logic and process. The new workflow features enable more advanced, robust no-code solutions. New and improved workflow features include:

> A new workflow architecture

> No sacrifice to existing workflow investments

> More expressive workflows with stages that allow you to model workflows as logically grouped actions

> An improved email editor

Analyze External Data in Excel You can connect to external data in Excel 2013 and keep the data synchronized. For example, you might want to create and share a sales report in a central location. Excel Services supports most external data connections so that workbooks in SharePoint libraries remain up to date.

Publish Visio Diagrams Using Visio 2013, you can link data from an external list to a diagram and its shapes. You can then publish the diagram to a SharePoint document library as an interactive web

drawing so users can display the diagram and view the associated external data. There are three ways to link rows of data to shapes in your drawing. You can link rows to existing shapes one at a time, you can link the rows to shapes automatically, or you can create shapes from the data.

Manage Security, site management, and site upgrade

> Allow or disallow iFrames

> Improved Site Collection upgrade experience:

Site collection health checker: Site collection owners or administrators can use the site collection health checker to detect issues with their site collections and address them before upgrading the sites to the new version. The health checker can repair some issues automatically, but others might require manual steps to repair. The health checker is available after upgrade as well, to detect health issues on an ongoing basis.

Request an evaluation site collection: A key benefit of separating the process of upgrading software and data from upgrading sites is that it allows site owners or administrators to run sites in SharePoint 2010 mode until the sites are ready to be upgraded to the 2013 version. In preparation for upgrading the site, site owners or administrators can request an evaluation site collection, which is a copy of the site, for review purposes. Evaluation sites are set to automatically expire and be deleted.

Project Based ComplianceCompliance features of SharePoint Server 2013 have been extended to sites. You can create and manage retention policies, and the policies will apply to both the SharePoint site and an Exchange site mailbox.

> Compliance officers can create site policy, which defines the retention policy, or which items should be kept, for the entire site and the shared mailbox, if one is associated with the site.

> Project closure can be scheduled or it can be an event that users trigger at a later time.

> When a project should expire.

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

— Robert Solow, father of the Solow computer paradox, 1987

“[Organizations] need to reexamine how information workers spend their time and look for ways to shift a greater percentage of it to real value creation.”

—IDC, 2012

EXCEL

Flash Fill Feature Predictive data entry can detect patterns and extract and enter data that follows a recognizable pattern.

Recommended Charts ImprovementGenerates questions around charting and other advanced functionality questions as it makes certain tools easier to use. This tends to drive additional functionality questions as Microsoft brings advanced functionality features to a level accessible for the average end-user

Quick Analysis Tool The new Quick Analysis tool can help both new and experienced users find options for working with selected data. This tends to drive additional functionality questions as Microsoft brings advanced functionality features to a level accessible for the average end-user

PivotTables Drastically improved where and how it recommends tables which make the feature easier to use

New Excel Functions You’ll find several new functions in the math and trigonometry, statistical, engineering, date and time, lookup and reference, logical, and text function categories. Also new are a few Web service functions for referencing existing Representational State Transfer (REST)-compliant Web services.

Power Query Use Power Query to easily discover and connect to data from public and corporate data sources. This includes new data search capabilities, as well as capabilities to easily transform and merge data from multiple data sources so that you can continue to analyze it in Excel.

Power View Utilize this function to discover insights about your data with highly interactive, powerful data exploration, visualization, and presentation features that are easy to apply. Power View lets you create and interact with charts, slicers, and other data visualizations in a single sheet.

Power Map Is a three-dimensional (3-D) data visualization tool that lets you look at information in new ways by using geographic and time-based data. You can discover insights that you might not see in traditional two-dimensional (2-D) tables and charts.

Connect to new data resources To use multiple tables in the Excel Data Model, you can now connect to and import data from additional data sources into Excel as tables or PivotTables. For example, connect to data feeds like OData, Windows Azure DataMarket and SharePoint data feeds.

PROJECT

Insert Online Video You can watch right in Word, without having to leave the document, so your viewers can stay focused on your content.

Save and Share files in the cloud Now it’s easy to share a document using SharePoint or OneDrive. From there you can access and share your Word docs and other Office files. You can even work together with your colleagues on the same file at the same time.

WORD

VISIO

New Customizable Reports With Project 2013, you can create crisp, colorful, professional reports without having to export your data to another program. Add pictures, charts, animation, links, and more — everything you need to clearly and effectively share project status info with your stakeholders and team members.

> Burndown reports: Show planned work, completed work, and remaining work as lines on a graph. They give you and your stakeholders an at-a-glance status, letting you know if your project is on schedule or not.

Built in Skype Features Project 2013 helps you stay in touch with your team members. Get progress updates, ask quick questions, or even have long-term strategy discussions, all without leaving Project. Just hover over a name and star t an IM session, a video chat, an email, or even a phone call.

Trace Task Paths With a complex project, your Gantt Chart can star t to look like a tangled knot of bars and link lines. To help sort this out, you can highlight the link chain — or task path — for any task. When you click a task, all of its predecessor tasks show up in one color and all of its successor tasks show up in another color.

SharePoint Workflow A new SharePoint workflow template now supports stages, steps, loops, and custom actions.

Coauthor diagrams as a team Several people can work on a single diagram at the same time by uploading it to SharePoint or OneDrive. Everyone sees what shapes are being edited in real time. Every time you save the document, your changes are saved back to the server and everyone else’s saved changes show up in your diagram.

Web Broswer Diagram ReviewReviewers can view and comment on diagrams, even if they don’t have Visio installed. Use a web browser to review diagrams that have been saved to Office 365 or SharePoint.

ABOUT VITALYSTVitalyst, the leader in employee software coaching and information technology services, provides unmatched application expertise and customer service, helping clients maximize return on investment by increasing employee proficiency and enterprise-wide productivity. Clients rely on Vitalyst for insightful and practical solutions about hundreds of applications, smooth migrations, Managed Help Desk Services and in-person and web-based training programs. As a certified Microsoft Partner with a special focus on supporting productivity tools, Vitalyst helps business users avoid frustrating and time consuming interruptions while providing the best possible experience with their applications. Key benefits to clients include:

• Business Impact

• Adoption and Productivity

• Unmatched Service and Expertise

• Immediate Access

• Seamless Experience

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