Join the Office 365 user community

We have over 16,000 members of our University community using Office 365. How many of them:

• complete tasks ‘the long way’ because they have no idea Office 365 offers a 5 second solution;
• know loads of great tips but don’t have a way to share them with colleagues;
• want to learn more but find the sheer quantity of online resources overwhelming;
• feel like they could be using Office 365 more but don’t know where to start.

This list could go on for pages. From chatting to colleagues around the University, a few things have become clear.

• A quick chat goes a long way in terms of building confidence. 
• You might feel like you’re the only one trying to grasp something, when everyone actually feels the same way (what’s the difference between Skype and Skype for Business again?)
• You don’t know what you don’t know! This seems obvious but without getting inspiration from other people’s work habits, how are you meant to gain exposure to helpful features and tips?

I love chatting to people and learning how they’re using Office 365 to be more productive and achieve things they couldn’t have five or ten years ago. It dawned on me that I was keeping this knowledge to myself and not actively sharing it with the wider community. 

This is why IT Services have decided to set up an Office 365 user community.

“Not another group,” you might be thinking. This time round, your presence isn’t required – only your ideas and willingness to try new ways of working. We’ve set up a Microsoft Team for you to promote which tools you use in your department and be more informed about the new features which are rolled out by Microsoft.

Who can join? It’s limited to staff only and you’ll need a University of St Andrews email address. No prior Office 365 knowledge is required!

Benefits of joining the Office 365 user community

• Be part of community where you can learn and ask questions through Microsoft Teams.
• Have the opportunity to attend in-person sessions that interest you.
• Improve productivity and departmental business-as-usual around communication, meetings, collaboration etc.
• Request further engagement activity for your area.

How to join

1. Open Teams Desktop app or visit teams.microsoft.com/
2. Go to Join or create a team
3. In the Join a team with a code, copy and paste in ul5zrlk.

There are four channels in the team:

1. General, for questions and anything Office 365 related.
2. Events and webinars, where we can discuss sessions that may be useful to you.
3. Introductions, once you’ve joined – post here to let everyone know where you work and why you’re interested.
4. New features and updates, where IT Services will post new features that seem significant. If you notice something new that we’ve missed, let us know here!

Topics we’ll cover

• Raising awareness of Office 365 apps like Sway, Stream, Forms, Teams, Outlook
• Reviewing old business practices and looking for digital alternatives and opportunities – Emailing over five people for input or feedback, hand-written meeting minutes, open plan office phone calls, in-person meetings, post-it notes (the list goes on…)
• Trialing features, we want you to feel confidence hosting a video conference!
• Business tasks and sharing knowledge. How do you organise a meeting, schedule and run and video conference, co-author and publish a document, manage your workload or manage group work?

Aim of the community

We want to give staff confidence using Office tools which are completely free and supported, whilst becoming more productive so they can save time doing every day tasks.

Picture this:

I receive an email from you asking if I’m free tomorrow for a coffee meeting. I’m about to reply “Sure, I’m free 11-12, 3-3:15 and just after 4.” Instead, I remember that I can use scheduling assistant to check when we’re both free. I send you an appointment, save myself time from writing an email and you time reading it. Quick, easy, done.