Visio is a piece of software which enables users to create a variety of different both 2D and 3D diagrams, and is designed to make this process as easy and intuitive as possible. Visio can be used to create any sort of diagrams users need, from simple organisation charts to more complex process maps with multiple swim lanes and decision points.
Other examples of the kinds of diagrams that can be created include building and office plans, timelines, Gantt charts and brainstorming diagrams.
General benefits include:
Easy access to shapes and stencils, and a new
status bar that helps you move more efficiently within and between your
diagrams.
Add and align shapes easily and accurately with
features such as the Quick Shapes Mini Toolbar, enhanced dynamic grid,
automatic layout adjustment, and page Auto Size.
Simplify large and complex diagrams using
Sub-processes and Containers to group related shapes visually and logically.
Check diagrams against business rules and logic
to ensure accuracy and consistency in diagrams. With a one click, you can
validate a diagram to make sure if it’s logical and property constructed.
Create and monitor SharePoint workflows more
easily than ever with a new advanced template that contains SharePoint workflow
rules and logic.
To build these diagrams, users can either select one of the
pre-built templates, customising it as they wish, or they can start from
scratch and use some of the several hundred shapes that are available. If users
cannot find the templates or shapes they required, they have the option of
downloading more templates from the internet or creating and importing their own
shapes. Users also have the option of importing data and information from other
application in Microsoft Office, such as Excel and Access.
Visio is available through the
cloud and on premises. For cloud usage, users have two plan options, named
Visio Online Plan 1 and Plan 2. The former is a better option for those wanting
to create simple diagrams, whereas the latter is more suited for the creation
of professional diagrams with data integration. Included in Plan 2 is access to
the on premises application, whereas Plan 1 is cloud-only.
For using Visio on premise, two
different licenses can be purchased: Standard and Professional. The Standard
license has basic functionality and enables users to create and share diagrams.
The Professional license, on the other hand, enables users to do much more.
Multiple users can collaborate on the same diagram simultaneously and diagrams
can be linked to data, with the diagrams updating automatically as the data
changes. Professional users also have access to more templates. The
Professional license comes as part of an Office 365 subscription.
Project is a project management software that is
available through the cloud, known as Project Online, and on premises, known as
Project Server. It enables project managers to plan and organise projects,
assign and schedule tasks, track and monitor progress, manage budgets, analyse
workloads and generate reports. Project comes with pre-built templates of a
range of project management documentation, which reduces the time wasted on
starting these documents from scratch and allows users to focus their efforts
on more valuable tasks.
It is also possible to build custom templates to suit
specific project types, or that could be used across multiple projects.
Project has a range of functionality that users can
utilise. For example, users can easily track the availability of resources that
an organisation has at its disposal. Each resource within an organisation is
given a calendar that lists its availability and Project is able to schedule
tasks based on these calendars.
Some of the main functionalities are:
Planning & Scheduling
Project Timeline View
Collaboration
Reporting
Resource Management
Multiple Projects
Different Views
An additional bonus is in dealing with ‘What If’
scenarios. It’s common to be asked how timelines can be changed (usually to
bring them forward) – Project allows you to easily go back and modify the criteria
(eg resource availability, parallel-pathing of tasks, etc) to see if a more
appealing scenario could be an option.
Project Online, the cloud-based solution, is available
on a per-user monthly subscription plan with the options for the Essentials,
Professional and Premium packages. It also integrates natively with Office365,
for seamless working. This allows the various Office365 applications to be
included and utilised for their functionality
Project Server comes in two versions, Standard and
Professional, and is available for an upfront fee.
Planner
Microsoft Planner is a project management solution
which allows has a range of functionality to assist project managers in their
role, for example creating plans, scheduling and distributing work, tracking
progress and managing time. Using Planner enables project teams to easily share
their documents to the whole by uploading them to a central repository, which
allows organisations to increase collaboration, transparency, coordination and
team working.
Much like the other applications in the Microsoft
family, users benefit from Planner’s close integration with other Office 365
applications, such as Outlook, SharePoint and Teams.
Planner uses task cards arranged into columns, with a set of columns forming a ‘board’ for a project. This allows the tasks to be viewed visually at a high level, being able to easily see how/where they are included in the project.
A common use for Planner is in Incident Management.
For example, there could be columns for New Issue, Evaluating, In Progress,
Closed. Tasks raised would be progressed through the different stages, and
would be allocated to an individual to take control of.
Planner is available on the following Office 365
subscriptions: Enterprise (E1, E3 and E5), Education, Business Essentials and
Business Premium. It is not available for personal use.
Microsoft PowerPoint is a program which offers users the ability to create presentations to display information. PowerPoint come with a wide range of templates for a number of different kinds of documents which can be used to customise the way in which information is presented on the slides. This allows staff to focus their time on the information and data rather than on formatting.
PowerPoint has been the
traditional presentation software in the Microsoft Stack for a number of years,
and is considered to be ‘Business Standard’ in many organisations.
Presentations can be created using a wide range of options, utilising media such as images, GIF’s, tables/charts, audio, videos, etc. Different viewing effects are also available, to create a richer display for viewers to gain further information from.
Presenters can keep track of
their notes, which are only visible on the device that the presentation is
being displayed from; viewers of the presentation cannot see these.
Using Office365 through a
browser, presentations can be created, edited, viewed and shared. It’s also
possible to have collaboration on a presentation by multiple people in
‘real-time’
PowerPoint can be used in a
number of different effective ways to communicate with your audience. Slides
are completely customizable to fit your needs. Depending on your approach, you
may want to have a presentation that is text-heavy, image-heavy or some
combination of both. Text-heavy presentations are generally good if you are
giving a lecture to a group within your company and want them to take notes.
Image-heavy presentations can help to make your presentation more
conversational in style since there only visual cues. Combining the two
approaches gives listeners the benefits of both visual aids and notes.
Sway
Although PowerPoint is normally
the go-to application for producing presentations, Microsoft has another
application which is focused towards enabling users to easily create more
engaging presentations, with an emphasis on telling a story rather than
presenting a topic.
Sway is a presentation software which enables users to create a range of different documents, such as newsletters, business presentations, portfolios and reports. Although Sway and PowerPoint have many of the same functionalities and capabilities, Sway is Microsoft’s attempt to provide users with a more user-friendly application that focuses on creating content that will engage audiences through telling a story. The emphasis on telling a story rather than creating a presentation means that Sway guides users to create a storyline and narrative, rather than individual, segmented slides of a presentation.
Sway comes with a number of
in-built templates to help begin the process of creating presentations, or ‘Sways’.
This enables users with non-design backgrounds to easily create Sways that are
both visually striking and engaging. If users cannot find a template to start
with, they have the option of searching a topic and Sway will produce an
outline of a Sway based on this topic for them to use.
It helps gather, format, and
share reports, newsletters, web pages, and presentations on an interactive,
web-based canvas that that presents well on almost any screen. The
collaboration allows you to invite others to be able to edit the story as well
in ‘real-time’. It’s also possible to include videos (eg YouTube) and other
content from external sources.
Sway is exclusively cloud-based
and a free version is available to all users with an Outlook account. An
upgraded version is also available in most Office 365 subscriptions for Home
and Business.
Presentations can be published to
external (public-facing) websites, and include analytics that will show you how
many people have viewed it
Microsoft Office 365 is a
software-as-a-service which allows access to a suite of applications through a
subscription-based model. Office 365 can be used for both home and business
use, and is available on premises and through the cloud (note that some of the
extended functionality is only available through desktop applications; access
to these will depend on the level of license purchased).
Word
Word is a word processing application which is used to create, edit and format written documents for both home and business use, and it is available in every subscription level across the Office 365 platform. It can also be purchased separately outside of a subscription.
Word has wide applications in the business world as it can be used to create any sort of business document, such as proposals, reports, plans and memos. Templates for these documents can be found in both Word itself as well as online, allowing users to create their documents without having to waste time formatting documents. Also, due to the range of design options available in these templates, users can choose templates which fit the culture of the organisation.
With collaboration, it is
possible for multiple people to be viewing and editing a single document at the
same time.
Excel
Excel is a widely-used
spreadsheet software that allows users to calculate, analyse and visualise
data. Like Word, it is part of the core applications suite and is available as
part of every subscription package for both home and business use. It can also
be purchased separately.
At the most basic level, Excel
can be used for entering and storing data. The program, however, has far more
capabilities than this, and contains around 500 functions to carry out a vast
amount of different tasks, ranging significantly in complexity. The functions
available range from simple, everyday functions such as sum, average and count,
to more complex and specific functions such as the ACCRINTM function which
calculates the interest accrued on a security which only pays interest at
maturity. Due the vast capabilities of the program through the functions
available, Excel has wide application in the business world and can be a
powerful tool for organisations.
Excel also has the ability to use
the data within it to create graphs, charts, pivot-tables and other items. This
allows for data to be able to be presented visually, enabling people to quickly
see an overall picture of the data.
It’s also possible to connect
Excel to other data sources (either as a once-off, or with a continual link).
This can allow data held elsewhere (e.g. Dynamics365) to be manipulated further
within Excel itself. Examples of scenarios for this include comparing and
utilising multiple data sources to create an overall dataset.
With collaboration, it is
possible for multiple people to be viewing and editing a single spreadsheet at
the same time.
PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is a program
which offers users the ability to create presentations to display information.
PowerPoint come with a wide range of templates for a number of different kinds
of documents which can be used to customise the way in which information is
presented on the slides. This allows staff to focus their time on the
information and data rather than on formatting.
Further information can be found
in the documentation for ‘Microsoft Presentations’
OneNote
OneNote is a notebook software
which enables users to capture ideas, take notes and create task lists. Notes
can be created using text, audio recordings, videos and highlighting and
annotating text. Users can organise their notes into pages and sections and
notebooks, and can easily share their work with others.
Benefits of OneNote include:
Taking notes & gathering information on any
device.
Synced on all devices for anytime access to
notes.
Create notebook sections inside books.
Create notebook sections inside notebooks
Create pages & subpages inside sections
Handling mathematical formulae natively
OneNote is also optimised for
touchscreen and tablets, allowing users to enter data directly without using a
keyboard. Benefits of this include being able to draw diagrams directly into
documents, placing flow diagrams easily, etc.
It’s also possible to directly
implant other files that can then be referenced, such as saving images from the
web, articles from news-sites, and other items.
Access
Access is a database software
which allows users to collect, store, sort and manipulate databases. Access and
Excel are similar in that they both store data in columns and rows, and can carry
out similar tasks, but there are important differences between the two
applications and how they are used by organisations. Access is more focused
towards for working with databases, and as a result it has a much greater
storage capacity than Excel, which is not designed for storing large amounts of
data. It is also preferable to use Access to handle large amounts of records,
for example, as the manipulation of the data is more productive and it can ensure
consistency and accuracy.
When looking at implementing
database systems, it could also be useful to consider using Microsoft SQL
Server as the database layer for large/complex solutions.
Access is available in the more
premium subscriptions for home and office use. Alternatively, it can be
purchased separately outside of a subscription.
Publisher
Publisher is a publishing
application (only accessible through a desktop application, not as a hosted
product) that comes with the more enterprise Office365 licenses, or as a
stand-alone application. Publisher differs from Word, which is Microsoft’s
flagship word processing application. Word is for writing documents, whether
they be long or short with the tools to add page numbering, footnotes, tables
of content, indexes, references and annotation. Publishing on the other hand
specialises in creating newsletters, brochures, and greeting cards that have
graphically rich content and require precise positioning of text and graphics.
Publisher comes with many
templates specifically designed for most printed media with pre-positioned
placeholders for text and graphics. This makes it easy to choose the layout
that best suits the application, for example a newsletter and then start adding
text and graphics to suit.
Everything that Publisher does is
about creating an aesthetically pleasing layout, formatting and the control
that the designer has over objects on a page. Images and even blocks of text
are all elements to Publisher and they can be positioned anywhere on the page.
Additionally, all these elements are independent of one another. Changes to one
element’s position, colour or size doesn’t affect any other element.
Today I had the opportunity to present to a technical graduate intake program about Microsoft Dynamics. In fact, it wasn’t just about D365, but about Microsoft in general.
Having spent a few days researching what I was going to talk about, I gained fresh appreciation for the journey that Microsoft has undergone, and where it could be going to.
As we all know, the landscape has changed beyond measure from when things started as a simple add-in for Outlook. When CRM 1.0 was launched as a standalone application, it was purely on-premise. Since then Microsoft has iterated through multiple versions, offering a cloud solution, and then flipping the product around so that the cloud solution is the primary product (we all know scenarios that still require on-premise, and it’s obviously annoying that on-prem is a release cycle behind at a minimum!).
Building out the additional capabilities, from F&O to Talent, AI to Forms, the full product stack really is now a wall-to-wall solution for clients, small to large. There are no other providers who can offered a single integrated solution (single sign on, same interface/GUI, etc).
It was rewarding to hear the questions asked in the session, and see how they were experiencing D365 for the first time 🙂
Although I’ve had much more time in the Dynamics sphere than the graduates, I’m experiencing my own firsts with D365. Be it PowerApps (shout out to Chris Huntingford – https://twitter.com/tattooedcrmguy for that) or Talent, I’m expanding my own knowledge and skillset. In doing so, I’m hoping to share that with others, to help them as well, and pay it forward
