Microsoft Community Office Hours, Episode 1
On March 23rd a small group of us launched the “Microsoft Community Office Hours” during this COVID-19 quarantine period as a way to connect with each other (for our own sanity) and also help anyone in the community with questions about Microsoft products and services. We’re holding these events at 8am and 6pm Pacific in an effort to reach folks in Europe and Africa (EMEA) in the earlier session, and across Asia Pacific (APAC) in the later session….and, of course, across the Americas with both times. These sessions are currently hosted in a Zoom webinar while live streaming to a couple Facebook community locations — but primarily to the Office 365 Community page, which is a great resource to ask questions and get answers.
We tend to get a few commenters questioning our use of Zoom each week, but because of our streaming — which Teams Meetings / Teams Live cannot natively support — we’re sticking with it for now, but hope to have an alternate solution in place soon (Restream+OBS). Until then, we’re using the available tools for us to reach the widest audience, which is on FB.
In this first episode, recording on March 23rd, 2020, I was joined by Sean McDonough, MVP (@spmcdonough), Riaz Javed Butt, MVP (@riazjavedbutt), Hal Hostetler, MVP (@TVWizard), and Sherman Woo (@spsherm). Topics covered included:
- Work from Home (WFH) tips [2:07]
- Are there read receipts on discussions within Teams channels? [14:42]
- Where’s the best place to go to find Microsoft 365 learning and adoption resources? [18:26]
- The new Office app, and problem transferring media/images [23:53]
- How do you change the Microsoft Teams meeting information? [31:46]
- Is it possible to “clear out” or archive the Channels in Teams? [34:13]
- Cancellation of community events 🙁 [40:10]
- Are Home Sites GA yet? Can you have more than 1 Home Site? [41:20]
- Microsoft Teams in hybrid environments [43:27]
- Teams meeting caps [46:06]
- Microsoft providing a COVID-19 Crisis Management template for SharePoint [51:04]
- The new Microsoft Office app capabilities [53.21]
- Learning Pathways [1:01:23]
- Discussion on MVP Antonio Maio’s user group session on Project Cortex [1:09:46]
- Common experiences of IT teams during this quarantine period [1:12:38]
- Using Zoom vs Teams vs Facebook to reach the community [1:17:04]
- Sharing some customer experiences with Teams and SharePoint during the quarantine [1:23:28]
- Handling this social distancing [1:42:08]
Or, you can watch the entire recording here:
If you would like to join one of these sessions as a panelist or to ask questions, you can find us live streaming on Facebook at 8am and 6pm Pacific every Monday during this quarantine period throughout April and May, possibly into June.
