Link SharePoint and OneDrive to Adobe Acrobat

Connecting your SharePoint and OneDrive account to Adobe Acrobat DC, allows you to open PDF files directly from OneDrive and SharePoint.

Under the “Home” tab in Adobe Acrobat, you will see the option to Add Account.

From there you have the option to add Box, DropBox, OneDrive, and SharePoint. You go through the normal 2-factor process, and there you have it, you can connect your OneDrive or SharePoint site with your Acrobat.

• For OneDrive, you just enter your username and password.
• For SharePoint, you need to know the URL to the document library you’re looking for, not just the site.

Acrobat will prompt you to name your account – give it a useful name so that you will know what files you’re looking at. You would need to make a connection for each document library you want to access, therefore this may not be the best tool out there.

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Microsoft Teams: the answer to true collaboration?

Collaborating with other people just got a lot easier. I don’t know about you but there are a lot of limitations with each of the ways available to us for collaboration. Each tool works for its own purposes but has some limit that doesn’t quite make it a true collaboration tool. I have found the CHAT feature within Microsoft Teams to get much closer to the true collaboration we want to see. Try it out!

Use the CHAT feature in Teams to collaborate with individuals

• It’s better than Skype because you don’t have that necessity to both be online at the same time.
• It’s better than Email because you can get quick questions answered and work on things together.
• You can share files, and all your shared files are in one location, right in Teams

A note about file sharing using Microsoft Teams

• If you upload a file from your desktop to your Chat window, your file will be uploaded to the Microsoft Teams Chat Files folder in your OneDrive.
• If you shared your file from your OneDrive, then the file will remain in its original location.

Microsoft Teams keyboard shortcuts

If you’re like me, you don’t always want to have to move your mouse to get to the various features inside an application. Here are a few shortcut keys you can use to navigate inside the Microsoft Teams space.

These shortcuts only work in the Desktop Application but they are handy nonetheless.

• ALT + Up and Down arrows let you toggle between the people you’re chatting with team channels you’re following, meetings on your schedule so you can see the details locations for your files, after which you can use your up and down arrows to navigate to, and select your files
• ALT + 1 activates the Activity window
• ALT + 2 activates the Chat window
• ALT + 3 activates the Meetings window
• ALT + 4 activates the Files window

Microsoft Teams: Features & Limitations (Part 5)

Disclaimer: the original article about for this was written a few months after Teams became available to the education space. Some of the descriptions of features may not work exactly as written. I will attempt to update these as I begin using this tool more extensively in my new organization.

Microsoft Teams appears to be a great improvement to giving us the capability to do truly collaborative work. It appears to facilitate collaboration and communication in a way that I have not seen collaboration be done before. In this series of articles, I explore two or three features or limitations of the Microsoft Teams space.

VERY COOL FEATURE: You can copy files from one team to another

Here’s a scenario we can easily see play out:

• As a communications person, I might collaborate on my team for the content of an article that I need to submit to the Communications Team who collates all the articles into a very cool and informative newsletter.
• I work with my coworkers, I work with my manager, and we all look at it during our staff meetings, all from within our Teams environment.
• Then when it comes time to submit it, I would normally have to take this document, save it out to a desktop or perhaps copy it a OneDrive location, so I can share it with the other team.
• Now consider that since I am a member of this other team as well, I can just select the file, choose copy and copy it to the other Team environment. How cool would that be?

Yes, it creates a copy, and it may be edited further by the Communications Team but that’s OK, because that’s their prerogative in terms of space. You still have your submitted copy in your environment that nobody is editing. In some cases having duplication can cause problems, and so if your scenario is likely to cause a problem, then just delete the copy from the original location and then the only copy will live in the new environment.

Microsoft Teams: Features & Limitations (Part 4)

Disclaimer: the original article about for this was written a few months after Teams became available to the education space. Some of the descriptions of features may not work exactly as written. I will attempt to update these as I begin using this tool more extensively in my new organization.

Microsoft Teams appears to be a great improvement to giving us the capability to do truly collaborative work. It appears to facilitate collaboration and communication in a way that I have not seen collaboration be done before. In this series of articles, I explore two or three features or limitations of the Microsoft Teams space.

FEATURE: Microsoft Teams comes in browser, desktop and mobile app

Teams is available wherever you are, with most of the functionality accessible in all versions, with a few caveats:

• The camera chat/meeting function only works in the desktop and mobile apps; it does not work in the browser app
• There is a feed feature in the mobile app that allows you to see conversations for all your favorite channels in one feed. And by favorite, we do mean favorite. You need to mark your channels with a star for them to show up in your feed.
• The desktop and phone apps have visual and sound notifications when you miss something. I set my Teams app sound to a knock, so when I get a message, my phone “knocks” and adds a visual notice to my Teams app, showing the number of activity items are waiting . Likewise, the desktop also shows the number of activity items that are waiting for you.

LIMITATION: can’t zoom in on text in Microsoft Teams

Teams has a set font size, and there does not appear to be a away (yet) to change the font size. This can get tough when trying to view an Excel sheet in Teams. Without actually going in and choosing Edit in browser or desktop, you cannot just zoom in.

My workaround for that:

• use the Open in SharePoint function in the Files tab and then opening the file in a separate browser window.
• You can then use Ctrl and + or Ctrl and – to adjust the zoom for your file.

Microsoft Teams: Features & Limitations (Part 3)

Disclaimer: the original article about for this was written a few months after Teams became available to the education space. Some of the descriptions of features may not work exactly as written. I will attempt to update these as I begin using this tool more extensively in my new organization.

Microsoft Teams appears to be a great improvement to giving us the capability to do truly collaborative work. It appears to facilitate collaboration and communication in a way that I have not seen collaboration be done before. In this series of articles, I explore two or three features or limitations of the Microsoft Teams space.

FEATURE/LIMITATION: Microsoft Teams automatically compresses the conversation threads

Each conversation notes the question and the last answer to the conversation. It’s a feature in the sense that you can easily scan all the conversations and then dive into the particular conversation that’s of interest to you. I do like that it declutters your screen and gives you an overall view. Where this might be seen as a limitation is that it does this to all conversations. Teams does not appear to keep track of what you necessarily saw last time you clicked in the thread. Perhaps it could either highlight or expand the conversations you haven’t read so you don’t have to hunt for them and click each conversation to review the replies.

FEATURE: Tag specific people, the whole team, or the channel

Tagging people can be helpful so they are notified that they need to come in and respond to an idea, question, or comment. To do so, start using the @ sign and then begin with their name. You can use first or last name – the feature is smart enough to check the whole name. A notification will appear in the Teams application task bar icon as well as the Activity bell in the application. If you are mentioned in a conversation, it will show as red so you can look for it. You can also tag the whole channel by using @channel and then hitting the tab key to pick the current channel. You can also tag the whole team by using @team and then hitting the tab key to select the current team. Note: just using @team or @channel doesn’t appear to do anything.

FEATURE/LIMITATION: All your files are stored in the Group SharePoint site

We consider this to be a major feature, especially because all the files are stored in one place and all the Teams files are stored in folders according to the in which channel they belong. As you add files into conversations, or add them to the channel’s Files tab, the files are kept in a back end SharePoint site, which you can get to by clicking Files within Teams, and then Open in SharePoint. Where there is a slight limitation is that while all the Channel Files are accessible in the Groups Files function, files that are only in Groups (i.e. for the whole group, and don’t pertain to specific channels), don’t make it into the Teams app until they are manually moved into one of the Teams channel folders. While on the one hand it makes sense, it seems like a slight lack in functionality to have to take the extra step to look for your file in either SharePoint or in Mail so you can see them in Groups. It’s just something you need to know and something to keep in mind.

Microsoft Teams: Features & Limitations (Part 2)

Disclaimer: the original article about for this was written a few months after Teams became available to the education space. Some of the descriptions of features may not work exactly as written. I will attempt to update these as I begin using this tool more extensively in my new organization.

Microsoft Teams appears to be a great improvement to giving us the capability to do truly collaborative work. It appears to facilitate collaboration and communication in a way that I have not seen collaboration be done before. In this series of articles, I explore two or three features or limitations of the Microsoft Teams space.

FEATURE: Conversations can center around a document

This is probably one of the most used, and most helpful feature that Teams brings us. Yes, we’ve been used to sharing files, and collaborating and several of us being in the same document at once, but oftentimes there are things you want to say about the document, and not necessarily in it. I know Microsoft Word and Excel have had a “Comments” feature for decades, but let’s be honest, nobody really uses that functionality they way it could be used, and it was always a little cumbersome to actually do so, and by the time you publish the document you had to remove (and therefore lose) all your comments or save a copy of it with the comments removed. You certainly didn’t want to have an annotated document out in the real world with all of your internal comments. Microsoft Teams gives us a way to solve that issue. Each document that’s loaded into Microsoft Teams has the ability to have conversations.

FEATURE: Tabbed (or pinned) documents or services

We mention tabs earlier in this article. The power of tabs comes from “pinning” certain documents or tools to the tabs, or navigation. In one of our channels we use the tabs to pin progress reports, the task calendar, and important reference documents for the project. It keeps them easily available and clickable as we need them. Other documents are found in the conversation threads.

Microsoft Teams: Features & Limitations (Part 1)

Disclaimer: the original article about for this was written a few months after Teams became available to the education space. Some of the descriptions of features may not work exactly as written. I will attempt to update these as I begin using this tool more extensively in my new organization.

Microsoft Teams appears to be a great improvement to giving us the capability to do truly collaborative work. It appears to facilitate collaboration and communication in a way that I have not seen collaboration be done before. In this article, and the next few, I will explore two or three features or limitations of the Microsoft Teams space.

FEATURE: Conversations can be sorted by channel

The use of Channels is where we believe Teams is truly powerful. Our group has several “dump everything here” kind of systems. There’s a Google Group where central communication is sent, there’s an Office 365 Group, which currently does not get a lot of usage, and then we have Teams. I like that we can keep conversations contained around a certain project or topic. This way I can work actively on the two or three channels that pertain to me, and more or less ignore, or sporadically check the other channels. Having the conversations split out this way saves me from needing to read every group communication to discern whether or not it pertains to me, and if it does, to categorize or classify it as something I need to either know or take action towards. Keeping the information in channel keeps conversations archived so I can refer back to them and I only see items pertaining to that topic or project.

FEATURE/LIMITATION: Only view 5 channels at a time

Our team probably has about 10 channels now. Teams will show up to 5 lines of channels. If you have more than 5, the fifth line will become a “more channels” line. I haven’t decided yet whether this is a feature or a limitation. It is a feature in the sense that it eliminates the clutter on your screen. You only see what you want to see. You can choose up to 4 channels to appear in your favorites and therefore ignore the project channels of which you are not a part. It would be a limitation if you were one of the people that touches all of the various projects and thus would need to see all channels to see if there was new activity.

FEATURE: Any channel containing new activity shows up bold

This is extremely helpful so you can quickly see at a glance where new things have been posted. Caveat to this – sometimes you’re already in a channel that has new information and was bold when you see another that’s got activity in it. By the time you go see what that other activity was, you may forget that the initial channel also had new info. There’s no way to make a channel as bold to remind yourself to go back and check.

Microsoft Teams: Team Wiki vs MS OneNote

Team Wiki

The Wiki on Microsoft Teams does not appear to live (i.e. store its files) anywhere outside of the Teams environment. It’s a very basic WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor with very limited ability to customize text. You can bold, italicize, underline and highlight text in a Wiki, and you can have conversations about any section inside a Wiki.

As of yet, we do not know where the data for a team wiki is stored other than deep in Microsoft’s black hole of space. So… there’s no way to export your wiki to another location, or download an offline copy. You can access it from the native Teams app either on your desktop or on your mobile device, but it doesn’t live on the team’s SharePoint site.

Wiki vs OneNote

While the Team wikis are nice, for keeping longer term team notes, you may choose to create a OneNote tab instead, which has a lot more features, has its own app, and is a lot more robust.

OneNote Tabs inside Team Channels become section tabs in the actual Office 365 Group’s OneNote file, which is located in the SiteAssets library on the Group’s (and therefore Team’s) SharePoint Online site. Viewing the OneNote file in the Teams environment, will only show you the current Section (Tab). To view the entire OneNote Notebook, you can go to the Waffle in Office 365 and choose the OneNote online app, or you can open the file in your OneNote desktop client by clicking “EDIT IN ONENOTE”.

Sections with Pages and Pages with Sections

So here’s a cute one: OneNote uses sections that contain pages; Wiki uses pages that contain sections.

In OneNote you place your content on pages that live in sections (tabs), just like you would work in a real life three-ring binder. You place content on pages in a binder, and use tabs to organize your pages. Within the pages, you have content blocks that you can use to move images and icons and other content around to make your OneNote page more user friendly.

Microsoft Teams vs Office 365 Groups

Microsoft Teams can be described as an Enhanced Type of Office 365 Group. When you create a Team, an Office 365 Group is created at the same time.

The graphic below shows the features for both Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams.

 

Office 365 Groups	Microsoft Teams
Threaded Conversations (EO) Mailbox (EO) Calendar (EO) Files (SPO) Site (SPO) OneNote Planner (EO = Exchange Online, SPO = SharePoint Online)	Creates an Office 365 Group Channels (topic or project focused) Conversations (threaded) Emoji, Giphy, Sticker Video (Teams Desktop App Only) Files (SPO) The Team files appear on the Office 365 Group SharePoint site – with the channels appearing as folders Wiki Custom Content Tabs Connectors – push 3rd party apps to conversation feeds

IMPORTANT: OFFICE 365 GROUPS CONVERSATIONS DO NOT SHOW UP IN TEAMS

CONVERSATIONS HELD IN TEAM CHANNELS DO NOT SHOW UP IN OFFICE 365 GROUPS