One aspect of taking on leadership for the digital workplace is to learn and use the apps of Office 365. When you are doing that you will notice that from one day to the next some features could have been added (and others removed or at least moved). Office 365 being a cloud platform allows Microsoft to do rapid development and release (as compared to the traditional distribution via CD-ROM:s).
In this article we cover how you as a leader can keep up with the changes that are released for Office 365.
First, let’s take a look at why it would be important for you. These are my ideas:
- The value you can get from the new features
- Showing leadership – if you are the one who brings the news to your colleagues you would show leadership
- To avoid misunderstandings – You would not risk problems to arise due to a lack of awareness (e.g. when giving advice to a colleague with the wrong description of the interface)
- Being on top of change gives a good feeling
There are a lot of changes coming to Office 365 each week, but most of them are either on a technical level (programming and administrative level) or for apps that you don’t use. So you will need to narrow down and zoom in.
Microsoft provides a page “Stay on top of Office 365 changes” that describes the official channels from Microsoft on the changes that are being released. In short, these are the Microsoft channels:
- Message center for Office 365 admins
- Targeted release
- Roadmap for Office 365
- Blogs and Community
See the Microsoft page for more information on these channels.
Besides the official Microsoft channels there are great deal of updates coming from experts on Office 365 via their accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and elsewhere. There are many consultants who keep their eyes open and post any change they spot for Office 365.
If you start to keep track of these channels you will soon notice that the information is quite technical and that there are a lot of noise coming through.
You might wonder if “it is possible to get “already-curated” information?”
Well, you could join a community of like-minded people where you help each other to keep track of relevant changes. You just have to find the right group or community. Search Facebook for a group on Office 365 (there are a great deal of technical communities and not so many for the end-user side). You are welcome to join our community “Leadership for Office 365” that we host on Facebook, which is for people who are interesting in learning how to best lead for the digital workplace to gather and discuss things like the updates to Office 365 and how they affect the various productivity scenarios. You can ask for a membership here.
Another way is to subscribe to our newsletter where we extract the most relevant updates to Office 365 and frame it for leaders. You can sign up here.
