Your Office 365 subscription includes so much more than Outlook, Word and Excel. In this webinar, we explain how your firm can leverage other applications in the O365 stack to improve your workflow efficiency and matter management.

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So in today’s agenda, I was going to do, obviously an introduction I was going to touch on the apps that you probably already using, so there’s plenty of stuff that you probably already using their the apps that you should be using. So these are apps that we use internally here, so this is not a do as we say, not as we do type of scenario. We actually use these in their hugely beneficial, so being a professional services company just like you guys are, these are beneficial for us and we think they’ll be beneficial for you. As well, we will talk about functions and the features and the use cases, particularly the context of a law firm, and then at the end we have a special offer for attendees. So just as a quick introduction at your Office 365 subscription includes a lot more applications than just the ones you probably used day today. So the outlook word and excel. Through some of the other stuff that that we can use as a whole bunch of stuff in there, but we’re just going to run through the highest value ones or what we think the highest value ones are in that application stack. That will help you operate your firmware efficiently. So the first thing we’re going to do is have a look at how we access all of the apps. So if you are in Office 365 user and you don’t navigate to office.com all that often, we can see here. I’ve just brought up another window. If you navigate to office.com you will see some stuff in here, but to access all apps there’s this panel on the left hand side and we can see there’s a whole bunch of stuff there right down the bottom. We actually have a button for all apps, so we’re going to do is we’re going to fire that up. 10 In here we can say all of the apps that we have access to an apology for, not looking at the camera. I’ve got the two screens going here too, so we can see that there’s a whole bunch of stuff in the all apps area, so if you’ve not been in here and how to look at what some of these things are, I do encourage you to jump in and have a look at some point in time. Open them up. You can’t break anything, so it’s always worthwhile jumping in and having a look, and we can see that there’s actually brief descriptions against all of the apps there. If we hover our mouse over them. So the next thing that we want to or that I wanted to touch on was the licensing side of things. So there’s different subscriptions that include different apps within the Microsoft 365 Realm. And when I refer to Microsoft 365 and referring to what used to be called Office 365 just to clarify here, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom change the name of it last year. So it’s now Microsoft 365. So the easiest way to tell which subscription you have if you don’t know just by looking at the. The pricing this is all available online is just to go into office.com. Go to all apps and just see what you have there as your inclusions. The easiest way apart from doing that I find to determine which license T you are on. Basically 365 business basic only includes online apps and Business Standard includes the desktop application. So if you downloaded Office 365 and you have the desktop applications installed on your device. That is a surefire way of being able to tell that you have Business Standard. Now Business Standard includes most of the apps that we are actually going to be looking at today. Most of those are not included in business basics, so it’s just worth keeping that in mind if you’re on business basic, you won’t have most of these if you’re on Business Standard, you will have all of these, so that’s the easiest way that you can tell an if you go to microsoft.com you can see all the pricing. It’s all there publicly listed and we sell it for exactly the same price. So some apps that you likely already using so much people who are using Office 365 already have their email set up there. So that’s exchanger exchange online. Your online email server teams, so we’re obviously on teams today doing this webinar. We can, uh, I can’t share that window, but that’s OK. Run teams today doing our webinars so this is a new function of teams as well. Feel free to shoot me a message after the thing if you’d like to have a look at the web and R functionality and one drive so there the online apps that we tend to find the firms are using and then obviously the desktop applications as well. So some of the apps that we think you should be using. Are some of these buttons now? We’ve dropped the icons in there. They will mean absolutely nothing to anybody except technical people like me, of course, but what we’re actually looking at in terms of those icons is we have Microsoft SharePoint, so it is an enterprise document management system that is part of the Microsoft 365 stack, and we find that most firms aren’t actually using it for document management. You have network files and you have your practice management system, but it’s all of that other stuff that we’d like to see firms putting in there. It’s hugely beneficial. We have Microsoft Planner which is our tasks platform for Manning managing individual and team tasks for projects. So we use this internally a lot. It’s one of our favorite apps in the stack. We also have Microsoft bookings, which is the be here. So it is your online booking solution for Microsoft 365. So the same way that you book in with the Doctor and you do it online. Or you might book in with your hairdresser and do it online. It gives you the same. Capability for each of the people within your Office 365 stack to be able to. Postal published services online so that people can book with them directly, which is really advantageous. We also have the power automate application so power automate is for creating flows and automating jobs and functions within Office 365. Hugely, hugely powerful and we’ll see a little bit more about that later in the presentation and then we obviously have Microsoft forms, which is just a digital form builder, so an online digital form builder very, very very convenient. So yeah, we we also like that one. So we’ll do is we’ll have a quick chat through the functions and features of each of the applications, and then we’ll do a quick demonstration on each of them so that you can actually see those in practice. So SharePoint functions and features so SharePoint Server can be a little bit of a complicated beast. It has an interesting history where people have seen it as an intranet or something that doesn’t work, or lots of things, but it’s now at a point in time where. Certainly service scale. I have spent a lot of time within that application, worked out where it fits and how it can work. So yes, it can be an intranet, but it is actually an enterprise document management system. So as part of 365, where would you actually store your files as a replacement for what used to be network folders? Or you might have it in some other form of cloud application like Dropbox or Drive SharePoint and Enterprise Document Management System and can be configured that way. So the way that SharePoint works is it has sites. So each site is basically a a block or a filing cabinet within the SharePoint environment and they have members that are allowed to see the content within the site. So you add members so users within your environment you add them to the site and that will give them access to essentially that filing cabinet and everything that’s contained within it. It will then have libraries so within the filing cabinet you will have a series of libraries. So document libraries you can have list libraries as well so I can capture just data. But quite often we’re configuring document libraries so places you can store documents so that you can categorize those. Some of the other advantages of that is that it works the same way as one drive, so you can connect those document libraries that you create. You can add them to your OneDrive and sync them locally to your device so they just work like a network drive would. Historically, which is something that that we certainly like, ‘cause it’s really easy and familiar to use for most of our users. And the other thing that it has. Is Web Part so it’s widgets that actually sit on the site on the home page and it can bring up data from the site and also from external locations as well, so we’ll have a quick look at that in a second and the other thing that it does is it’s really well integrated across the 365 stacks, so it’s integrated into teams, so if you create a site and you have members, it will also create a corresponding team so that you have a teams channel you can chat. We can share information it links directly back to the site. You can have no pads and. Or notebooks you can have planner plans all sorts of stuff. Links to that group, so why would you do that? If you have a departmentalized business? So so you had different practice groups is a really good example, so you might do family law and commercial litigation. You would have a different site for each of those and that would give that team the ability to share information that’s only relevant to them. So you might have the the the core calendar or the court roster as a calendar within a SharePoint site that is. Only relevant to the family law team and you might have the same thing for the commercial litigation team as an example. So I’m going to open up SharePoint so we’ve actually built out a basic SharePoint structure with a few things just so that we can demo it. So over on the left hand side here we can see we have SharePoint, but if we look in all apps we will be able to see it here SharePoint. So I’m just going to open that up so that we can have a quick look so when we talk about sites this is how it comes up. Just as a bunch of tiles. Now all of this is completely customizable, so out of the box this is what it looks like, but it’s completely customizable in the way we do it, so we can have different landing pages, different designs, different navigation. All sorts of stuff, just depending on what your requirements are. So I’m just gonna jump into our service gala demo so I’m just so that we can have a look at a couple of these functions now. The first thing that you’ll see here these are the web parts so we can see here that we have upcoming leave requests. Just as an example of something, so we’re pulling that data for upcoming Leave requests from a calendar which we have created within the within the site and I’ll get presented up here. There’s actually power. Automate links to this so that we can do leave requests and applications and Daisy chain applications together within the 365 sack, which is pretty cool. We’ll come back to that with the power automate piece. Here we can see we just have some links, so if we hover our mouse over those down the bottom, you can see that they all go off to forms.office.com so their digital forms that we’ve created. We also have our external links, so off to some external sites, so just quick links for quick navigation for people so they don’t have to save them in their browser or do all those types of things so we have a new employee come in, you add them to the site and go. Here’s the links to all of the relevant stuff so that they don’t have to manually create this save things. We’ve added some clocks in here as well just for different time zones, so we obviously have customs over in WA. It’s good to know what time it is over there and whether it’s OK to call them or not, so we can see that there’s different time zones in there. And here’s some team tasks. This is from planner so we can embed a planner widget basically onto the homepage. It’s just for a quick snapshot of things that are going on and we can see how some recent documents there as well, so some stuff that we’ve uploaded into the site. Over the left hand side, this is where we have our libraries. So within the libraries we have a few different bits and pieces, so we have a contract register. For example there’s a couple of documents that sitting here we can customize all of these metadata fields. So when I say it’s a proper document management system, I do mean that it is a proper document management system where we can attach metadata so mandatory and non mandatory fields. There is all different types of fields that we can have against these, so if someone wants to upload a document into there we can force them to fill out those fields as they go through. This list type libraries as well. So basically this is a an Excel spreadsheet hosted in the SharePoint environment might be convenient. This one we used for social reorders. Just as an example, there’s another one here for leave requests. That is a. There’s a few more things going on so we can see approval statuses and things like that that’s actually attached to power automate as part of a workflow and coming back to plan. And we did touch on that, but we’ll come back to it, but you can actually have a planner. Page for a specific site. So for a specific team and we can see some things in planner there. Well, the next thing that we’re going to have a look at is forms, so the ability to create digital forms. We really like this if you sign up to our webinars before you would have build in one of our digital forms reforms. And if you are an existing customer of ours, it will be the same. So as part of our on boarding procedure, we send out a form. We get people to fill in that digital form and behind the scenes of routes often creates your accounts with us. You’re a couple other bits and pieces that send some notifications just to let people know that the onboarding process is happening. Really, really cool so I can customize the branding. You can publish it internally and externally, which is convenient. They might have internal forms if you’re a big organization. The data collected in an Excel spreadsheet, so we actually collect everything as data, which means that we can use it and that data can be pushed through to other systems automatically using power automate. So power automate is creating those flows, or those processes where we go OK when someone fills in that form, take that data and put that data into this location or create this transaction or create this file or create this matter, whatever it happens to be. All of those things can be automated, so it’s quite a powerful tool there to get 2 forms. Again, it is the same process we go to allappsinoffice.com. We can see forms there will click and open that we actually have a couple of forms in here already, so we’re just sort of replicated our client on boarding form. Now this is the administrative view, so we’re having a look at how we can configure the form. Very, very simple. So we just have some fields in here, some mandatory fields collecting some information. We can say we have text fields. We can have number fields. We can have date fields. You know if these sorts of bits and pieces if we preview this form, it will actually show us what it looks like. So this is a new client. Onboarding form takes 6 minutes to complete, but we can see that it has pagination in it as well, and so you know you fill this page in next and fill in the next page next. Which is quite good if we just go back to forms when we create a new form, we go new form and have an untitled form. We can change the theme so we can put some branding on there. If you like being under the ocean or something, you could have the octopus or not sure that’s gonna be on brand for many firms, but there’s quite a few things that you can have in here and basically you just adding you choice text writing. There’s a few other options that you can have here, but really quick and simple to configure. Once it’s done, we go share. We have a link so you can see here. 7 collects responses only people in my organization. Anyone can respond means that you’ll be able to publish that link externally and external people can fill it in very, very convenient. Jump back to our presentation so the next one will go. Have a look at his bookings. Now. I don’t actually have bookings configured in my environment so I have it open in another tab. So to get to bookings again, all apps bookings now. This is essentially a fresh bookings environment so there’s not much configured in here yet so you can see we don’t have a logo. It’s just a demo at some point to me, but. How does it work? Well, it’s an online calendar system, so people can book with you directly online. It’s integrated to your calendar, so at the moment I’ve just configured myself and sky in here and. We can set services so we can have different services, so this one isn’t an initial konsult. For example, it’s an hour duration. We can set a price and we can assign stuff to it. So if you have a service and it might be an initial discussion and you have, say, three people that summer can select to have an initial discussion on boarding discussion with you, assign those staff and they are then becomes selectable in the interface. So if we jump back and have a look, we have a booking page, so we can actually open the published page. It’s a very pretty in pink today. We can see here that we have an initial console, so you can send someone this link and basically you can select the staff member. So we might say that it’s me. We might have a look at Monday and we can see the availability now. This is coming directly from my calendar based on what’s booked in my calendar. We can also capture some additional details here to go through. So I went up to their name and their email and book it. One of the other things that is really advantageous if we go back to configuring the settings. As we can see here that we can add an online meeting. So if you want this to be a teams meeting it simply check check an online meeting and it will book it as a teams meeting. To do it all online, you can obviously set the duration. There’s a few other options in here which you can go through and tinker around with to see how they work, but if you do need some some input on this on how to configure it, feel free to reach out to me after the after the webinar and I can run you through those things that’s. Good. So the next thing that we have in our list is planner, so again it is the same process as we used to access all the rest of the things within the Office 365 stack we go to. Office.com. Go to all apps and you can see there’s actually shortcuts and ways that you can use the icons. That’s why we use the the icon so that you remember what they are. But here we have planner. So it gives you the ability to create an assigned task. Individuals or teams add task list items to each of the tasks. So you might have a task to do something, and then there’s a checklist of items that need to be done, or some tasks you can group tasks into categories or buckets, set due dates with reminders as a whole bunch of stuff that you can do. This is in our demo tenant, so there’s actually not a lot of data in here at the moment, but as an example there might be I can see in my tasks here there’s a couple of things that I need to do that have been assigned to me. They are overdue, but that’s OK so we can see that we have a bucket for blog articles so we have a team that might be our business development department. We have blog articles that need to be done as part of our content marketing so they will go into the bucket of blog articles and basically will every time we have an idea or a knowledge, idea or an article. Idea will add a new task in and assign that to somebody so we can see a due date. There might be some notes we can see our checklist items. We can have attachments and we’re going to sign that too, and. Individual or team as well, so it doesn’t have to just be assigned to an individual. We can assign that to multiple people. Ironically, things your firm needs for 2021 on SharePoint, all of it is my recommendation, but we can see that I have not yet completed that task. Good thing is, once it reaches the due date we get a notification. All of those things I just built in as part of the system. We can see the charts of items to be done, so there’s some nice graphical stuff there and we can see the schedule so we can see where the tasks sit on our calendar within Planner. So the next thing that we are going to have a look at is power automate. So power automate. The ability to create automated workflows with different triggers. So there might be different triggers might be time it might be when something happens when a piece of data changes within emails received from a particular person. All these types of things will act as a trigger. It’s the perfect tool to move data, documents and tasks around the Office 365 stacks. So as an example, we might go OK. Well, we have a new client on boarding form. We send that to them when that’s been completed, we want to send a notification to the account manager. We want to send a notification off 2 accounts with the information so that they can provision the account side of things and request money be placed into trust. We can create tasks. We can create a record in our CRM or in our practice management system. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that we can do with that. The distinctive advantage of it is the ability to Daisy chain applications together so we have forms that will write stuff out to SharePoint, which will create calendar tasks in exchange or in our. Calendar marking shared calendar or personal calendar, but you can Daisy chain applications together so I could move data between them. Great transactions where they need to be created and because everything I I hope is in the Office 365 system will be able to draw on the resources, teams, groups, sites, whatever it happens to be to actually make that work. So it’s a really powerful tool in terms of workflow together to string those applications together to make sure that we’re not manually copying and pasting stuff through. It’s a no code platform, so sometimes you can put a little bit of code in there, but for the most part of no code platform, so you can actually go in there and look at templates and basically just drop them in selectable list. You can pick stuff to do, it will have a look at that in a second and you can have personal which is user based one so users can jump in there and create their own little flows to automate functions that they’re doing all the time and you can have business based ones as well. So if you have one that’s going to apply so to the business. More broadly, you can set it up under a dedicated account that’s actually going to run those flows. For you via power automate. So I’m going to bring it up and we can have a look at it. There’s some that I’ve configured previously for other webinars that we’ve done on workflow. So if we jump into power, automate and have a look so again same process, we go to office.com all apps, power, automating. So this is what the interface looks like, so you can see here. Easiest thing, start from a template so we can see here when the status of a task in planner changes to complete notifier channel. When we’re talking about a channel were talking about teams channel which is linked to a SharePoint site so that same group. So if you had a Department of Business or a practice group, and when something gets completed implant and you want to notify everybody in that group, you could just click back. Putting some basic configuration to make that work. So really really good. If we have a look at some of my flows, so the ones that have already been configured this will give you a better idea of stuff that we have actually put in place. So one is forms processing to email in SharePoint. This is from the client on boarding, so the on boarding document if I edit that we can actually have a look at what it contains. So the trigger, when a new responses submitted via reform, we want to do apply to each, which means each response that is received. This is what we want to do with it. Now I know that it may look a little bit overwhelming. Looking at it here, but it’s actually relatively simple, so we’re just going to get response detail. So the form responses were going to send an email notification and create an item in SharePoint which will just be a list item. So I will send an email notification to somebody. Will create a task, so we’re going to create a task and send an email notification. The task is being created, so that might be up two accounts. Or to a practice manager, for example, and will also send another email notification back to the client saying, hey, your information is being received. This is what we’ve collected. It will take this amount of time to complete your on boarding process before will reach out so we can do some expectation management as well. So it’s a. It’s a pretty simple one that will happen all the time. So there are things that we want to try and automate using tools like this. We can send form responses for approval so we can do an approval process as well. We can send things to planner and assign them, so that’s something that we do quite a lot. Please send things crossed the planner and assign them to people to be executed. This one is another one that’s a little bit left of field. It’s contract expiry upcoming, so we looked at our contracts register before where we have a contract expiry date and what this flow does. Is it we can open up and have a look at it. What it does is every day at 3:00 o’clock it will run through and try and find any contract that is. Three days from expiring. And then it will send a reminder. It’s not bringing that up. That’s OK, I will just send a notification saying, hey, these are the ones that are due to expire in the next three days. So those are the types of things that you can do and look at the end of the day to save somebody manually going in and trawling through those trying to find where some contract expires are happening. It’s all just automated. I love this because I’m lazy. I don’t wanna have to go and do all of that. I don’t want to think about it. I just wanna say this expires in three days. Better do something about 30 days or 90 days. Whenever it happens to be going, do something about it. So I particularly like power automate. I think it’s very, very powerful and it certainly binds all of those things in the Office 365 stack together. Well, jump back to our presentation here. So there’s a whole lot more available, and we’ve only really scratched the surface of some of the things that we can do. The idea of today was just a bit of an information session or an introduction to some of those things that are there. I would recommend that you go in and have a play around. Like I said really, there’s nothing you can break if you’re licensed to do it, going and tinker around and do some education if you get stuck. Our special offer today is that anyone who’s attended today’s session eligible for a free half hour consult with our team so that can be with me or one of our engineers that are here to go through and just have a look and help. You can figure some stuff out. So if you wanted to do the online booking sing, it’s really really simple. Half an hour of time will be able to guide you through how to get that configured. It might be to do some forms of might be to do something basic in in power automate to help you create a flow or create your first flow to automated process within your practice so you can actually leverage that. If you would like to take us up on that offer, feel free to reach out to sky. I think this guy’s been emailing you all or will be emailing you all after the event so that you can take us up on that and we’ll get you booked in from there using bookings of course. If you do have any other questions or you do not follow us, make sure that you get in touch. Follow us on our socials and again thank you for coming along today. I’m gonna jump back in because I’ve been presenting. It actually doesn’t show me. If anybody’s being asking questions and bits and pieces so I will jump back over here. Alright, do we have any questions? Sky as we were going through all good alright thank you again everyone and we will see you at the next webinar.