One of the exciting announcements from last month’s Microsoft SharePoint conference is that Microsoft will soon be releasing Homesites. Homesites will be a fully customizable homepage where the existence of your SharePoint contents will reside. To fully understand the impact that this addition will have, we need to understand the current view of a SharePoint page. To begin, SharePoint is essentially your company’s internal communication site, which is referred to as an intranet. This is where you find all of your saved documents and files. Up until this point, your SharePoint site was fairly generic and not exactly pretty or easily navigable. It essentially is a simple page with a list of files. Understandably, we are beyond excited about this announcement. Now, anyone who currently uses the Microsoft SharePoint Intranet will be able to customize their Intranet “Homepage,” creating an aesthetically pleasing homepage with your company’s voice and branding.

If you were using Microsoft Office in 1997, you hopefully remember Clippy. The adorable personal assistant who looked like a Paperclip. Some found him endearing, others found him outright annoying. Clippy’s primary purpose in life was to offer tips and suggestions to help you learn the different components of Microsoft Office. He sadly only made it a short four years, but luckily, Microsoft has developed a much more comprehensive and less intrusive replacement for Clippy. This application, which was introduced at the 2019 Microsoft SharePoint conference last month, is called 365 Learning Pathways.

Microsoft SharePoint has been around since 2001 so many may ask, “Why attend the 2019 SharePoint conference? What could be so different?” The answer is, a great deal has changed. We were thrilled with the announcements from this year's conference! It left us feeling jazzed as we left Las Vegas and we are positive the feeling was not from the bright city lights. It is evident that Microsoft has listened to our requests and has definitely delivered some impressive results.

Microsoft Flow is another amazing less-known application within your Office 365 stack. This app allows for an everyday user to customize business workflows to automate processes. Think of coding like a pro without knowing a thing about coding. This application easily will enable you to make If/Then statements for your own workflows within not only your Office 365 applications but also many other outside apps and services.

Gone are the days of solely creating slides shows with timed transitions! Microsoft Sway, one of the lesser known applications from the 365 Stack, allows for the creation of interesting presentations with incredible options, fantastic flow and presenter-less presentations. Sway is where today’s presentations are headed, so let’s take a more in-depth look!

Pendello Solutions has the goal in May of highlighting the lesser known apps within the Microsoft 365 stack. This week we have placed our focus on a very cool tool which will hopefully help you streamline processes within your organization. Microsoft Stream is a video service in which your office can securely upload and share videos with those within your organization. To fully grasp the benefits this application can offer, let’s take a look at what this app can do!

Microsoft is on the brain this month at Pendello Solutions as the Microsoft SharePoint conference is coming up later this month. As we dig deeper into our Microsoft 365 stack to prepare for the upcoming conference, we quickly realized that many are unaware of some of the lesser known applications within the comprehensive 365 stack. This month, at Pendello, we are moving our focus to a few of these lesser known applications within the 365 stack in hopes that it might help you utilize a few more applications that may bring a bit more efficiency to your workday. To start off the month right, we are going to look at Microsoft Forms.