 Passing presenter over to you right now, Justin. Thank you very much, Brian. I appreciate it. We are excited to go over SharePoint today with everyone, and SharePoint is a technology that Microsoft has released several years ago, but I appreciate that every single new release of SharePoint, it's refined more and more, and the features are becoming very user-friendly. Out of the box, SharePoint does need a little bit of customization, and we will be doing a deeper dive on SharePoint during our next session, talking about libraries and lists. Today's goal is to do a high-level tour of SharePoint. I'm going to spend some time making sure that we have the same vocabulary, so as we're interacting together inside of SharePoint, we know exactly what each other are talking about. I'm also going to be doing kind of a 30,000-foot kind of view of what is SharePoint, what are some of the best practices, best use of SharePoint, and, of course, we'll be exploring all of that in more detail during the following session. So the first thing that you'll notice is I have SharePoint open on our screen, and this is an out-of-the-box installation. There hasn't been any customization or anything done to the environment, so that's the first important thing to remember, is that SharePoint can look different between organizations. If we're collaborating with other teams or other organizations and leveraging their SharePoint, you will notice a slight difference in the visual look and feel, but the functionality is the same. And once you learn kind of the workflow or the way that Microsoft wants us to interact with SharePoint, it doesn't matter which organization that we're working with, the functionality is the same. So the first thing that I'd like to do is I want us to think back on how we use technology. And if you think about the goal of technology, like we want to use technology that makes our day-to-day life easier. I want to be able to quickly send an email. I want to know that my recipient has received the email and get a reply. I want to be able to quickly type a document. I want to be able to send it to someone and for them to review it and for me to get feedback on that review quickly and accurately. So there's all these different ways that we use technology. SharePoint is designed as a centralized hub. It's a way that a lot of the technology that we're already using is connected. So one of the things that I like to show straight away is a document that... And Brian, you have to let me know if you can't see the screen, but it's a... We can definitely see it. Thank you. It's a wheel that Microsoft has produced. SharePoint is just one wedge of the wheel. And all the other components that Microsoft has provided for us are ways that we can collaborate together. So you think about the way that we use Outlook. Outlook for me is my main collaborative tool. So I think about the ways that I can communicate to people using email, the way that I can kind of keep track of calendar events and meeting requests. I think about using the task feature in Outlook to kind of create lists or checklists for me to complete. Those are all collaborative in nature. SharePoint extends all that capacity. So the wheel that's represented on the screen is showing an interconnected kind of ecosystem that Microsoft has developed. We'll actually spend a lot of time on this session during an introduction to Office 365, but I wanted you to understand that SharePoint is just a small component. And I don't know about your goals for use of technology, but I want to use technology and I want to feel like it's working for me instead of maybe me fighting it all the time and feeling like technology isn't really helping me out as much as it could. So SharePoint, since it's a collaborative tool, it works well when we're using it to collaborate. What I mean by that is SharePoint can replace some of the workflows that we currently do manually. One of the examples would be the way that we track change a document. So some of us may have experience of that in Microsoft Word where we'll draft a document, but then it feels a little clunky getting the revisions complete and having someone sign off on those changes. Well, SharePoint can replace that manual process. So a lot of the things that we'll talk about today will be at the 30,000-foot level, but there's great resources online. Microsoft has a really great library of resources that we can ping if we want to do a deeper dive on some of these topics. But before I give some more examples, let's do a quick tour of the interface that you see on your screen. I think it's important that we have the same vocabulary while we're using SharePoint. So if you notice on the left-hand side of my screen, there's a list of links for home and notebook and documents, pages, and site contents. In SharePoint, this is called your Quick Launch Bar. Your Quick Launch Bar is very similar to your desktop where you want to have the most important links over there for your team members to find. At the very top of my screen, I have some links like Training and Marketing, Renee, you see some of the sites that we've kind of stubbed out. That's your top link bar. You can think of it as a navigation bar. So it's how you navigate to other areas inside of SharePoint. And then in the center of my screen, I have several different web parts. Web part is a name that SharePoint uses for any component that's displayed on the page. So in this example, there's a little Getting Started web part. There's a little News Feed web part. And I see on the right-hand side a document library web part. So it's important to remember that SharePoint, when you reduce it to its essence, it's just three buckets that we hold content or data in. So an example would be SharePoint has something called a site. A site could be something that you have broken up into individual teams. When we're configuring SharePoint sites for organizations, I see sites for marketing and the site for HR and a site for the leadership team, et cetera, et cetera. So the site is the largest container, the largest bucket. A site has two smaller buckets that we're going to hold content or data in, right? So the second bucket is library. A library in SharePoint just holds documents. So you can imagine storing your Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents, graphics, pretty much any file format that you currently use. There are certain file types that are blocked, and we'll talk about that during a later session. And the third bucket, of course, is a list. A SharePoint list is holding data. I think about a SharePoint list, it's very similar to an Excel spreadsheet where it has columns and rows, and each row can contain data. But once you get your brain wrapped around the fact that SharePoint is really just three containers that hold either content, you know, files or data, a lot of the other things that I'm going to cover will make a lot of sense. So recapping quickly, the largest bucket is your site, and then inside of a site you either have a list or a library. Now, as some of you have exposure to SharePoint, you would agree with me that's an oversimplification. There's a lot of detail around all three of those buckets, but our goal today is to kind of do a high-level look at SharePoint. So when you're staying in that 30,000-foot view of SharePoint and you look at what you see on your screen right now, this is our site. And if you look over on the right-hand side of my screen, actually towards the top more, one of the areas that I want to call out is who I'm logged in as, you'll see my name up there, Justin Bond. And then to the left of it, there's a couple of different icons. The gear icon is one that I want to focus on straight away. We're used to the cog, it's called, right, and a lot of different apps. And it's like a way that we can get into the settings of something. And the gear is contextual. Is that a phrase that we know from OfficeWrite where things will change or display differently based on where we are? I think about using Word or Excel. And if I have a graphic placed in my document, we know what happens if we single-click on that document, I'm sorry, on that picture, the ribbons change inside of Office and Excel. The same way if I had a chart, if I take my mouse and I click on that chart, the ribbons update and I now have chart tools available to me. So that concept of things happening based on the context is very important to remember. Microsoft is using that even inside of SharePoint. So right now I'm inside of a site, I'm actually in the marketing site. And if I hit the little gear, everything about the gear is related to where I'm at. And that's important. It's one of the things I see a lot of my new users getting lost on is they're trying to change a setting or they're trying to do something and we have to remember to first navigate to that resource. So navigate to that document or navigate to that calendar and then take advantage of the tools. So that's one thing I want to point out straight away. Your cog or your gear. And the second thing, on the upper left-hand corner of my page, you'll see Browse and Page. Those are also contextual ribbons. So I'm on the homepage of this marketing SharePoint site and if I click on the page ribbon, you'll see all the tools related to the page that I'm on. And as you start using SharePoint, what I recommend that you do is just get used to navigating to the resource first, then taking advantage of any contextual ribbons or taking advantage of any tools inside of your gear icon or your cog. Okay, so let's go into a little more detail. So the first thing that I want to look at is just a page. And that's what you're seeing now. So here I am on the homepage for the marketing site. And you can easily lay out the page many different ways. As a matter of fact, if you go to the page ribbon and I click Edit, Microsoft will allow the page to be unlocked and here's an example of what the page editor would look like. So I want to show that straight away because if you're frustrated by what SharePoint looks like out of the box or you want to display something differently to your team, you can edit the page to look or feel however you'd like. As a matter of fact, a lot of the things that I see on the page, if I don't want them here, I can actually delete them or reorganize them, move them around. There's all different ways that we can design pages. Some other day we'll probably go into deeper dive on page design because there's a lot of expectations there. As users, we want to see things and we want to find things quickly, right? So the structuring of your page becomes important. We always want to consider your audience and think about how they would expect the content to be displayed. So we'll go into some of those ideas later on. But you can see an example of how I could edit a page. I'm going to go ahead and just save that page to close out. All the pages going to hold are the two smaller buckets, right? So either list or libraries. So you actually have two examples of that on the page. The left-hand side is a little news feed. It's an example of a list. And right next to it, I see documents, and that's an example of a library. So let's go ahead and dive into two of these and kind of give you some ideas of the different types of libraries and lists at SharePoint has available out of the box. So one of the really quick ways that you can see everything that's available to you is if you go up to your cog and if you have the correct permissions assigned to you, you can actually add an app. And if I go to this dashboard, it'll give you a high-level look at all the different things that you can add to SharePoint. And this is where it's exciting to kind of build out content. Think about how your team can leverage SharePoint. And you have this opportunity to take things that maybe are happening manually and convert them into a SharePoint processor workflow. So here's a couple of examples. If I scroll down just a little bit, you'll see here's some noteworthy things that are available for us to add to our site. So here's a document library. And then here's an example of a task list. I'm going to call out some ones that will be familiar to us. Here's a contact list. Here's a calendar. There's task again. Here's a survey. And you notice there's multiple pages, of course. These are all components, categories or lists that we can add to our site. And usually new users of SharePoint are looking through this list and they're seeing a lot of similarities with Outlook. You see here's a calendar and there's contacts, both part of Outlook, right? And here's task, which is also part of Outlook. So that's an example of converting something that's more manual now over into a SharePoint process. So instead of maybe creating your task list inside of your Outlook, you can create a task list inside of SharePoint and the team could then compile on and add tasks. So it's more collaborative in nature. The same thing with contacts, right? In Outlook, there's several different ways to set this up, I realize. But generally, there's a global address list in Outlook and then there's your personal contacts in Outlook. And personal contacts is super powerful, right? Because we want Outlook to auto-suggest names for us and to automatically pull up a map if we have their address added to their contact card. But the kind of frustrating thing with contacts in Outlook is they're not easily shared with your team. Well, SharePoint gives you a similar list so you could actually have a list inside of SharePoint where all of your contacts are saved. And then your entire team can collaborate around those. So if I see there's an error in a contact card and maybe you added that contact, I can go in behind you and make an iterative change. Or I can add a picture or more detail to the contact card. And there's a lot of confusion around that and I usually get a question around the fact, well, Justin, why would we do it in SharePoint? We're doing an Outlook and it's working and I get that. And I'm a creature of habit too. But if we can change or convert some of these things over into SharePoint, it extends some opportunities to us. Things like version control where maybe I edited that contact card on top of you and I entered something that wasn't cracked and that flexibility of seeing the version history of everything that's changed and being able to roll back to any state. Or what about content approval where maybe I add two or three contacts and we've set that list up to say we're only gonna allow things to be published and let everyone see them if it's first approved and we've set up a person that's responsible for approving content. I add three people to the contact list and then she approves them and then everyone else can see those contacts. Or what about things like permissions where I wanna be able to create a contact list but I only want four or five people to have access to it. Or maybe one team has access to edit it and add things to it but all the other teams can only view it. So SharePoint extends all these other kind of features to things that we are already doing inside of Outlook or WordXL or PowerPoint. And one of the really cool things is that after you've converted over from the manual process over into the SharePoint process so I've gone through the process of creating my contact list instead of SharePoint I now can connect it to Outlook. So in my Outlook I would see my global address list of course my personal contacts are there if I've been using that. But now I've linked into a SharePoint list and I can see the contacts. If someone updates the contacts instead of SharePoint of course my Outlook is automatically updated and that applies to a lot of the different things in SharePoint. One of the ones that I use the most is the calendar. So let me just really quick create a calendar for you. So we'll call this one. This will be our training calendar. It will create the calendar for me. And then here is a list of all the content that's already created on the marketing site that I'm on. So you can kind of see how Microsoft organizes things into these different types. Remember here's our libraries. So I've got a doc library, a site asset library. And the list, so here's a little news feed list and there's that brand new calendar list that we made. So I'll click on that training calendar just to show you how similar it is to Outlook. So you've all seen a calendar before. So you recognize this month view. And if I come up here to my contextual ribbons you'll notice that I can switch to different views just like you do in Outlook. So there's a day view, there's a week view. And what's really kind of fun is just like you do inside of Outlook I can overlay additional calendars. A lot of us take advantage of that now look, right? Where I want to see Peters and Suze and Kim's calendars. I want to overlay them and I want them to be color coded so I can quickly look at a lot of different dates and make decisions on potentially a meeting. So the overlaying calendar works exactly like it does inside of Outlook. Another thing to kind of remember, I'm looking at this ribbon and I was thrown for a second because do you notice that there are several icons that are grayed out? So expand all, collapse all are grayed out because there's no events to expand or collapse, right? So the icons always kind of tell us what our options are. But I was thrown because about in the center of my ribbon there's an icon that says connect to Outlook. The reason that icon is grayed out is because I am using the Chrome browser, Google Chrome's browser. And that's just something to remember. There is a couple components inside of SharePoint that work only inside of Internet Explorer or Internet Edge. Connect to Outlook is one of those features because of the way that it uses an Act of X control. But if I had Internet Explorer launched I could click the connect to Outlook icon. It would ask my permission, Justin are you sure you want to connect this SharePoint calendar to Outlook? And I would say yes. And then this calendar that we're looking at would display inside of Outlook. I could add events, view events, delete events inside of Outlook. And I could see those changes reflected in SharePoint or vice versa. And it's one of the things that I really love about the SharePoint calendar. Everything else that I've been talking about also applies to this calendar. And one of the things that I want you to walk away remembering today is that SharePoint is super flexible. But sometimes there's so many options and so many features that we don't know kind of what to focus on or what to implement. The one that I want you to walk away kind of remembering today is that permissions rule everything that we're doing. So there's a set of permissions set up by default. And those permissions allow us access to different things inside of SharePoint. There's three primary groups that permissions are set for. And you don't have to remember this necessarily, but it's important to remember what the rules are. The first permission group is an owner group. A lot of people call the owner group administrators. I don't like to do that because as an IT professional, when I hear admin, I start thinking different things. In SharePoint, a SharePoint administrator has more control than an owner. So they're the guys that are setting up antivirus and they're deciding which files we can upload and they're doing lots of things that I'm glad they're taking care of for us kind of thing. But as a SharePoint owner, you're usually the person responsible for the site. So in this example, if I was on the marketing team, maybe I'm the marketing owner. So I'm the person responsible for adding content. I create lists. I create libraries. And then the rest of my team interacts with the content. That second group is called members. So a member is someone that can interact with content that's already been developed. They can add to it. So as a member, I could add to this calendar. They could just view it. I mean, that's something that a member would probably do too. But one of the things to be cautious though, if you're setting up your site for the first time, is that members also have delete permission. And a lot of times, as an owner of a SharePoint site, you want to set it up, get the calendar already, but you don't want your members to do anything except view the content and add content. You don't want them deleting anything. Well, SharePoint gives you a third group, rather. If you don't want to put them in the member group, you can put them in the visitor group. And the visitor group is the same thing as saying, read only. We set it up as owners, and the visitors can look at it, but they can't add. They can't change a course, and then, of course, they definitely can't delete. A lot of times, if that member group is making me nervous, I'll actually create it for group, which basically is the member permissions minus delete. So there's lots of different flexibility that's afforded to as there. You can set up as many different groups as you want. The three that I've mentioned are just the defaults. A lot of times when I'm setting up sites for organizations, they'll name their groups the same name as the organizational unit. So it'll be like the marketing team, or the IS or IT team, and it's just really easy for them to understand or remember, okay, well, I'm dealing with the HR team here, so I want to give the HR team this amount of access to this calendar, but I do not want the intern team to have access to this calendar. So it makes it really easy for them to kind of set up their permissions. So to recap that quickly, the one thing that I want us to walk away remembering is that everything that you see in SharePoint is controlled via those permission levels. So in the permission levels, again, we're owner, member, and visitor. And those are the defaults, and you might already see changes in those permission levels on the sites that you're interacting with now. So that's a quick example of a calendar and a little talk about permissions. Let's look at a couple more. So if I go up to my cog again and I add an app, another list that's very popular is task. So I'm going to go ahead and add a task list. I'm going to call this task training. This is just like your Outlook task if there's a couple of us using it already. Scroll down. There's all the contents on my site, and there's our little task training list that we just created. And one of the things that I like about the task instead of SharePoint, it is truly collaborative again. So if I add a task, it lets me fill out this little form so we could do something like we need to order paper. I could set some of the default, like when does it start? When does it do? And this is the part that I like. It's assigned to. So I could assign that to anyone inside of my organization. And of course, they would get a little alert email letting them know that a new task was set up for them. The labels that you see to the left task name, start date, do date assigned to, these are the defaults. And something that's important to remember in SharePoint is you can customize literally everything. And when we get into our topic about libraries and lists later on this month, I'll actually show you how to edit the labels or add things that maybe aren't here. Like maybe you want to assign this to a person, but also maybe you need it to have like a category. Like is this an administrative task? Is this an executive task? Is this a technical task? So you could add that little label for a category and build out that dropdown list to meet your need. Of course, there is a little show more. And I do appreciate that Microsoft does this, even in this task example, where I can fill out the critical information and then of course all this optional information, which if you've seen the task inside of Outlook that should look very familiar to you. Now go ahead and save that. So we just created a task. I didn't assign it to anyone in this example, so nothing too crazy happening right here. And then here is our little task. Whoops. I'm just going to delete this one quickly. Our little SharePoint hung for a second. So I've got a quick question here, which is can the tasks and contacts be integrated with Outlook? See and edit in both places with a single action? I love that question. The short answer is absolutely. If you go to your object first, I'm inside of my task list, and if I go to my list ribbon, there's the same Connect to Outlook icon that we had for calendar. There's only a handful of things that I don't recommend connecting to Outlook, but literally everything can connect to Outlook. I think Microsoft understands that Outlook is our go-to, right? So when we're inside of Outlook, we're doing the majority of our collaboration of our team. So if you convert some of your activity over to SharePoint lists or libraries, you absolutely can connect those into Outlook. Now Outlook is your one-stop shop for accessing those resources. The thing that I don't recommend that you connect to Outlook are huge libraries. All of us have a storage limit usually inside of Outlook, and I don't recommend some of those workflows related to connecting libraries. It depends on what you're doing. There are a handful of times where it is a good fit, but outside of that, pretty much everything else we normally will connect. Using the same process, navigating to the resource, going to the little ribbon, whether it's his list or library. Good question. If you have any questions hitting the chat, if you guys have any, we'll definitely address all of them. I'm going to go back up to my gear, and then I'm going to go back down to site. Oops, back to my gear, and back to add an app. I'll give you one more example, and I'm going to do discussion board. The reason I'm doing discussion board is my team has been using it quite a bit. You guys are familiar with forums online or different ways that... Maybe FAQs. There's different ways that I see this used, I guess, now that I think about it, but a discussion board for my team is valuable, because a lot of times we're emailing back and forth, and then I'll want to onboard a new hire, or I'll want to interface with a vendor, and they're coming into the project line, and they don't know any of the conversation that we've been having. So if we're working on a project or a task or something where we have a bunch of dialogue around, we'll do it inside of a discussion board instead of sending an email. Microsoft is making this even easier with some of their new products. One of those is called Microsoft Teams. We use Microsoft Teams pretty heavily in our environment. It's just another way to discuss and have a discussion board. If any of you guys have ever used Slack or some of the other products out there, it's very similar, right? If I create a discussion board, and we'll call this one Training Discussion, you'll see how the process is the same. So once you learn kind of the basis of SharePoint, whether you're creating libraries or lists or whatever app that you're wanting to add to your site, it's the same process. So I'll come down here. Here's my brand new training discussion. I'll pause and show something different here. Next to the name of the resource that we've created, you also see the type through their libraries or lists. And then over here is how many items are in each of those containers. And then over here is the last time it was modified. So notice it's not showing me who was the last person that modified something, but we can drill into that detail. All of that information is saved. So we know who was the last person to open it, print it, save it, change it, even delete it. So all that information is stored. I always tease my team and say, gone are the days of I worked till 3 a.m. on that because all of our data is tracked. And I always have to show them in Microsoft Word where you can see the total editing time of a document. So in SharePoint, that's called metadata, isn't it? Or properties of whatever the resource is. In this example, if I had properties for a discussion topic, it would be who created the discussion topic or who edited the topic last or who replied. Those are all examples of metadata or properties. So just a super quick tutorial of discussion board. So we talked about instead of sending an email, we would post it in the discussion board. So we could do it like this. It looks very familiar to an email. So subject, I could say, where is the staff meeting this month? I love those kind of like FAQ style discussion boards. Instead of me answering the same question over and over, we could use a discussion board to build out an FAQ. So we could pose the question and then we could say, it's at Panera Bread at 2.30. So you could answer it here. If you don't want to use that FAQ model, someone basically could pose a question and then anyone could come in behind them and answer it is how that would work, right? So it's very familiar to forums if you've ever used an online forum before. So it's just another example of a list. There are so many other ones in the document and list webinar that's coming up later this month. We'll spend a lot of energy on customizing these. We'll spend a lot of energy on setting up permissions and we'll spend some energy around how to make them your own. And that's what's important about SharePoint. You want to build things that you know your audience will use. We don't want any frustration or for it to feel like we're just adding something else to their plate. So we want to build things instead of SharePoint that we can truly collaborate on. Okay, so let's switch off a list and let's do a library, which I'm actually not going to create a library because I see one over here that was created by default. So if I go into this document library, you'll see the folder is currently empty. And here's what I want us to remember about document libraries in SharePoint. They're just like a folder on your computer. They're exactly the same. So you can create as many different document libraries as you want. Every time you create a document library, I want you to imagine yourself creating a folder. So maybe I create a document library and I name it Proposals. And I make another document library and I call it Statement of Work. And you can make as many as you want. You're not limited to the quantity. What SharePoint limits you on is the amount of file storage that's available to you. And every different SharePoint site, IT can configure our storage differently. So I don't want to lean you too much on what the defaults are since they're so highly customized. But just remember, we are storing documents. So what I recommend is documents that are stored in SharePoint are documents that you need to share or collaborate on with a team. Like I can't tell you the horror stories where I'll show up to a client site and they're complaining that they're out of storage. So I start navigating through SharePoint and I'm like, oh, me and someone is, you know, uploading tons of documents here that are just personal and the team isn't even able to leverage these. So let's go ahead and download those and store those someplace different. So I recommend putting documents up here that you know the team can collaborate on. So it's super easy to upload documents here. One of the things that you can do is you could just drag and drop just a document just like you do inside of Dropbox or some of the other apps that are out there online. You also could use the Upload option, which would let you upload a document here from your computer or maybe it's stored on your network and you would rather upload it to SharePoint. You also could use the New button. And what's kind of cool about the New button is it has blank templates. So you could say I want a blank Word document started here or an Excel document. There's all kinds of other options here you see. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to do an Excel workbook just to show you how it works because a lot of times when we first see this we're like, wait a minute, what's happening right here? And this is an example of Office 365 in their web apps. So when I'm creating a document inside of SharePoint, I have an option and I have an option when someone clicks on a document to say whether it opens up in the browser, which is what you see right here, or does it open up in the native app? And that's a choice we get to make. We get to make that choice per library that we create. So I could create a library for proposal and I only want people using the native Excel or Word app to edit proposals. But maybe I make another document, a library called scans. And maybe that's when I scan something on the printer they automatically drop into that library and that I wanted to open up in the browser. You can make all those decisions as a team. So here I'll just make some really simple changes here. So maybe I'll type January and we will fill this down. And then maybe over here I'll just have a number just so we have some data to play with. This will be kind of silly, but we'll fill that number one down. So we have some data now saved inside of our document and maybe we're looking at the interface. Maybe you're like a heavy Excel user and you're like, wow, Justin, the ribbon looks really stripped down. Where is the pivot table option? Wait, where's my charting option? And you're noticing that they're not here. So one of the things that you can do is just remember this is the web app. It's a kind of a simplified version of Excel that's installed on our computer. So if you're ever using SharePoint and by default it opens up in this web app and you're like, I don't like it. I want full blown Excel. What you notice right there in the center of my screen is the option to edit in the actual app. Since I'm in Excel, I would edit it in Excel but you can imagine the same thing happening if I was looking at a word or a PowerPoint document. So one of the other things I wanted you to notice is there is no save when you're in the web app. So there's a save as but we've been using computers long enough to know save as is saving it but giving it a different name, potentially saving it in a different location. The cool thing about the web app is it saves automatically. So every time I type something in a cell and I click off, it's instantly saved. The other really cool thing about SharePoint in documents is we could all be editing the document at the exact same time. So how that works, I don't have multiple people logged in to show you this but I would actually see their selection and the only thing that would be different is all of them would be color coded. So if Dawn and I are collaborating on something and she was over here selecting a range of cells in column H and maybe her color code is red and then Susan they're doing something over here and she's selecting in column B and maybe her color code is purple and that's really handy. Of course you can't be editing the same cell as someone else. I mean that would be awesome but how would we handle those conflicts, right? But if someone is editing something that you want to edit or control there is also a built-in chat feature. So when multiple people are editing a document on the right hand side, you would see all their names and you could have a dialogue in a chat with them as you edit a document. Not a new feature though, right? And there's a lot of other web apps out there that have used this kind of collaborative like let's all pile on and make edits at the same time. Our staff loves this. The one we use it a lot in is OneNote. I don't know if any of you guys have got a chance to use OneNote yet inside of Office but it's a really great tool for meetings for all of us to have the same OneNote document open and maybe we're treating it like a digital whiteboard or to be able to see the agenda and edit the agenda on the fly which unfortunately happens more times than I want to admit. But it's like a really cool collaborative kind of nature inside of the web app. A question that's commonly asked here is well why would I use a doc library and not just use like my desktop or my network share or something else? And the short answer is it's the collaborative piece. It's like being able to edit it at the same time. It's being able to edit this document over and over again but then having a version history like a paper trail of all those edits. There's really cool features inside of doc libraries where maybe we don't want everyone editing something at the same time. Maybe I want to be the sole editor. Well that flexibility of taking a document and checking it out or reserving it for only myself and then I'm the only person that can make edits on it. Like I mentioned before in the list example that content approval is also part of it where maybe we let anyone upload documents here but we want someone to approve them before they go live. So really cool kind of collaborative features. Notice up top there's two icons. I can't go into detail on these today but the availability of syncing this library to my computer. So maybe I travel a lot and this library is something I need access to while I'm disconnected from the internet or on the plane. I can click sync and basically download this library or sync it to my computer. And for those of you who have used the drop boxes of the world it works the same way. So if I'm editing a document on my local computer as soon as I'm reconnected to the internet any changes are then of course synced back up into SharePoint. There's also an icon here for flow. I wish we had a lot of time for this today but we just don't have time today. Flow is shortened for workflow. So that's the power of SharePoint and it doesn't matter if you're in a library or a list. It's just letting the system automate something for you. So maybe you finish the proposal process or you finish the document and the next thing that needs to happen is someone needs to maybe prove it and then approve it to be submitted to the client. Well you can build a workflow that handles those steps for you. So this document library and then maybe at that point you want to automatically email Sue and let Sue know there's a new document that needs proofed and packaged for sending to the client. So she automatically gets the email she clicks the link, takes it to the document she does her thing and then there's an option to say approve and then maybe at that stage maybe the document leaves this library and goes over to another library that only the client has access to. So it's that idea that a flow or workflow is really like all of the heavy lifting of SharePoint, all the automation that SharePoint can do. And I'm giving a document library example here but you can only imagine yourselves, all the different ways that a workflow could work inside of a list. I'm thinking of that task example we looked at maybe he gets assigned, he gets an email after he completes the task maybe we get an email saying he's completed it and then maybe he's automatically assigned five other tasks based on that completion. So anything that you can imagine can be configured as a workflow. Let's take a little bit of a deeper dive on the way that we view content in SharePoint. Remember there are three main containers the library and the list. Well as users we say in our world I'm in the marketing world that audience is king. So I want to be able to build something that meets my audience's need. But that becomes difficult. Maybe the admin staff needs to be able to look at these documents differently than the executive team. And then maybe there's different things that need to happen based on which team that I'm on. So it's that crafting of an experience that meets as many different needs as possible that becomes critical in the team feeling like SharePoint is working with them instead of working against them. So one of the ways that you can craft an experience inside of SharePoint is by establishing what Microsoft calls views views. If you're a database person that's a word that you're familiar with because all of view is is a different way to look at data. So in a document library maybe I want to see a view of all the documents or I want to see a different view that's maybe only documents that I've edited. You can imagine that would be a totally different look, right? Because if I'm looking at only documents I'm edited then I'm imagining that list being filtered down. The same way that I could create views that maybe filters the list of documents down by their data type, right? Only show me Excel. Only show me PowerPoint. So there's flexibility there. And once again, don't get lost in the example. I'm using a SharePoint document library as an example but that would work in lists as well. So I could say task list. Only show me tasks that are assigned to me. That would be a view. Or show me tasks that are complete. That would be another example of a view. So Microsoft usually gives you several views to choose from by default. So inside of a document library the default view that you're in is the all document view. So you'll notice in the upper right hand corner there's an option to switch between different views. So right here is I'm in list view. Here is an example of a tile view. You've seen this before and even inside of Explorer inside of Windows 10. And then of course I can actually edit the view. So we'll go into a lot of detail later about this in our next session but if I just quickly click edit the current view I just wanted to give you kind of a quick look at how you can change literally everything about what they're looking at. So some of the things that I would usually change are things like I want to see the file size and I want to know which version of the document is and these are all just columns that I can turn on or off in the view and the little numbers down the right hand side is the order that I want those columns but if I scroll down just quickly to give you a snapshot you could say okay view I want you to be sorted a certain way so sorted you know I like it actually how it is sorted by name and alpha, you know A to Z sort but then maybe I want to say filter filter it only show me excel documents only show me documents that were created by me so you can imagine any number of different filters and sorts and of course there are bunches and bunches of other things all of which we'll cover in that next session so what I'm going to do just for this short example is I'm going to just add those couple columns I added file size and I added version and then I'm going to come to the top and I'm going to choose okay and I want you to notice that my view is now a little bit different let me switch back to my list view so you can see it there's the name modified, who modified it file size and version of the document so super simple way to edit a view inside of a document library couple quick things else on doc libraries we said in the very beginning that all a library is is a folder but if you're like me I don't like navigating multiple folders and I feel like every environment that I'm in that's what it's set up like where it's folder inside a folder inside a folder I don't know if it's my OCD or what it is but I get lost quickly or it doesn't match the way that I feel it should be structured so there's a little bit of frustration there usually so what I find myself doing is using search so I'll go up to the search bar inside of SharePoint search for the document I'm looking for and I almost like just forget where they're stored because I'm leaning so heavily on search but if you've ever been frustrated by search like I have you notice that search isn't perfect there's that old phrase they used to use that said good data in, good data out or bad data in, bad data out it's the same principle when it comes to search we're only going to find things that have been structured properly so did they spell the name of the document correctly are we finding it did they not put the right properties with the document short rabbit trail on that when you're saving a document in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint it's important to put as much detail in that document as you can so use the properties of the document to store things like what department is it for or which client is it for are you going to categorize it a certain way do you need to specify different authors or put some type of number associated with it all that data is searchable so we have a high rate of success of search if the document is structured properly but who structures documents properly like no one right so I usually will get frustrated with the search feature so here's the other thing that will frustrate me by default Microsoft seems to stumble if there's too many nested folders so our recommendation is to only have a maximum of three folders nested inside of each other right so that's your main folder inside of that you have a folder and inside of that folder you can have another folder so three levels deep and we have a high rate of success using search if we limit our folder structure to three folders and if you're thinking to yourself wait a minute you didn't even show us how to make folders it's because what I would encourage that we do inside of SharePoint is not create them at all I would rather add a column to our library and the one I use the most is called tags so I upload a document and I tag it as marketing or I upload a document and I tag it as a proposal then I create a view and I say okay I want to switch to my proposal view and it would show me all documents tagged with proposal or switch my view to marketing and I see all documents related to marketing now here's the thing I know that's a hard sell and I know that takes a lot of thought and a lot of people agreeing to play by the same rules so a lot of times that won't work with the team that you're working with but that's the recommendation is to take advantage of views instead of creating a bunch of nested folders we see the most success instead of doc libraries when we don't replicate what we see on our network share where we take the opportunity to organize things structure documents in a way where they're easy for our audience to find but also easy for SharePoint to serve up to us to search or some of the other mechanisms that SharePoint has given us to find documents I can't go into detail those today but there's this whole kind of AI or subsystem called Microsoft Graph and there's this product called Microsoft Delve which will show you documents that you've recently worked with or show you team members that you've recently collaborated with and recommend documents to you so it's very sophisticated and it works really really well when the documents that we put into SharePoint are structured accordingly okay let's go into a little more detail on SharePoint as a web app so remember SharePoint is a site that site has lists and libraries inside of it libraries are holding our files our list is holding data task counter events etc so the thing to remember is is that SharePoint is a website and I think that's the part where I see a lot of those habits that we've created over the years surfing the web kind of causes fits inside of SharePoint so here's some recommendations when you're using SharePoint as a web app take advantage of good habits like example I see a lot of my users starting to do something for whatever reason the internet lags for a second and they'll use their back button and I see that back button causes more fits than we want maybe it restarts the workflow or it saves the document wise there's all kinds of reasons that we encourage them not to use their back button instead we have to design the site where they can easily get back to where they want it to go so they make sure that the navigation makes sense and make sure that the quick launch bar shows those popular areas so they don't have to force themselves they want to force the habit anyways of using that back button so you want to be careful of that the other thing to remember since it's a browser right and since we're surfing the web of course our focus is SharePoint you can use the same shortcuts you do as you surf other websites one of the ones that I want to bring your attention to is the control and the shift key on your keyboard so one of the things that you'll notice if I hover over these links on my quick launch bar what if I want to stay on my home page but I want to open up the document library in a different tab well if I hold my control key and I click documents it'll automatically open up not on my Mac it won't on your PC it will automatically open up in a new tab if you hold your shift key and click a link in a browser it'll open up in a new window and for those of us with multiple monitors you know the importance of that holding shift clicking on documents and then dragging that new window over to monitor 2 and now on monitor 1 I navigate to a different document library so maybe I'm over in the proposal libraries on my monitor 1 and on monitor 2 I have another library and now I have the flexibility of dragging and dropping between libraries so it's all the things that you probably normally do as you surf the web they apply to SharePoint another big one is just kind of the general concept of like how everything is stored in a library in a list well if it's stored in a library in a list in SharePoint then it has a URL so example I have this little Excel book right here and that's stored inside of the library called documents well if I hover over this um document and I hit the little ellipse that's what these little dot dot dots are called I hit the little dot dot dot I have the option of sharing it or copying a link or downloading it so on and so forth but the reason I'm showing you this is I can't tell you how many times people on my own team will open up Outlook attach a document fire it off to me in an email and all they're doing is cluttering up my inbox and taking away some of my storage because I have access to the exact same document that they're attaching to me so some of the kind of like learning to use SharePoint is just adjusting the way that we use it so instead of downloading that and then attaching it maybe I just copy the hyperlink open up Outlook draft an email and send it that way or here's a habit I wish a lot of my team members would break it's just the download option they'll download a document because they want to work on it locally and then when they're done they like upload it again and SharePoint's really good about that like if I download this Excel document called book.xlsx makes some changes and I upload it SharePoint will be like wait a minute Justin same name what do you want to do with this and it gives me the option there to make some decisions but that workflow is broken I don't want to encourage that because if I go through that process I've kind of jumped out of the options I had related to version control and I'm not taking advantage of check in check out some of the other really cool things that doc libraries do for us something else just kind of just to mention a couple other ones you notice here pen to top you can imagine a doc library that's enormous right hundreds of documents or it's a list with dozens of different discussion topics and that flexibility of pinning the important ones to the very top to make them easier for our audience to find so there's a super simple example I know it's a boring example too but you can imagine on the bottom hundreds of documents and the important ones are pinned towards the top of course library and list same functionality ok couple other things I go back to my home page let's go into that training calendar that we created before I'm going to come up here to my ribbon I just wanted you to notice that process of I have navigate first to the container in this example I've navigated to the site called marketing and once I was on the site marketing I navigated to the calendar and now as I make these edits and changes I'm doing it on whatever resource that I'm currently on and that's important because you'll notice there's this little alert me option and that's in libraries and in list and an alert is an email alert so there's those times when you're working on a team where you don't want to constantly go out to SharePoint and see if some new event is on the SharePoint event calendar or maybe you guys create a calendar that tracks everyone's vacation and you don't want to constantly go out there to see who's requested vacation in June you want to be able to be notified of that change the alert is a feature that allows that kind of mechanism to happen so a quick reminder for individuals we're a little bit over an hour here we've got somewhere in the 15 to 20 minute range left if you've got any questions please either use the raise hand function so that I can unmute you and you can ask the question or type it into the question box especially if there's a particular feature or something that you've got a quick question over so one of the things about the alert feature that's kind of cool is by default when you set up an alert I'm using the calendar as an example but don't get lost in the example this would work on a library the same way the default is is that the alert would alert you for anything that happens inside of the calendar or the library but if you only care about a single event right maybe there's that workshop that you're planning on going to you saw the event inside of the SharePoint calendar if anything gets moved or canceled you want notified we have that capacity too the difference is is you would click on the event first then from the event ask to be alerted so and that's important I'm trying to like really drive that home the idea that you always navigate to the resource and then once you're on the resource you start doing things like setting permissions or setting alerts or editing or changing deleting so it's that importance of navigating the resource before you set an alert then make a really quick calendar alert so here's going to be a staff meeting and I'm not going to make any changes you've got to see all the things that are on the little new item form when you're creating an event it reminds me of Outlook so if you're familiar with those tools in Outlook it's the same inside of SharePoint so I'll hit save so there's a staff meeting and watch how this works if I come up here and click alert me and manage these alerts oops I'm going to do it the way I should show you if I go to the calendar, alert me notice the label says set alert on this list which means I'm being alerted for literally everything that happens on the list and look how cool these options are so alert title I get to make that whatever I want I always change it because the reason is that's the subject that comes to you in an email and if it just said training I'd be like what is this thing reminding me of so you could craft that title to be whatever you want here's a little pro tip if you craft the title a certain way then in Outlook you could set up a rule or an alert to automate something so I could say if the title is SharePoint Training Alert just as an example in Outlook then I could make a rule and alert that says if I get an email that has the subject SharePoint Training Alert then do XYZ so it's the flexibility of connecting all of your technology together I'm talking about using SharePoint letting it alert you and then telling Outlook to pick that alert up and then do something else so there's a ton of flexibility there notice the second part of setting up the alert is who does it go to so right now it's going to me but I could type literally anyone in here so I could start putting my team members emails in here or a lot of times we use group email boxes so we could just put a group box here and then down here I get to choose does it email does it go to a phone number and then I love the flexibility of how the alert is triggered do I want an alert when anything changes do I only want to be alerted when a new item hits this calendar there's all kinds of options the one I actually use the most is the very last one where it says when to send alert the default is it sends the alert immediately which for me that's usually overkill so what I've been doing depending on the library or the list either do a daily summary so send me a daily summary of all server logs or send me a weekly summary of all vacation requests so it's just a really simple way for you to configure the way that SharePoint is alerting you for the change the edit the delete once again this alert works for libraries and lists so I'm going to cancel that so if you think about some of the things that I've been showing you today you'll you'll be kind of reminded of how we use technology now we just do it manually the one I think about the most is Outlook so my encouragement to you is that don't try to switch over everything immediately what I would recommend doing is finding like simple changes to how you do your day to day work and make small changes to the process maybe instead of having an Excel spreadsheet where you track everyone's vacation maybe you create a custom list instead of SharePoint that does the same thing maybe instead of keeping a list of all the activity that you've done today maybe you create a task list inside of SharePoint to do something similar a lot of times SharePoint it's a stretch to use it example that we have at our office is Surveys we use Surveys at the end of all of our training we use Surveys for different marketing efforts that we're doing and I would love to be able to use SharePoint Surveys for those but they just simply aren't a good fit and it's not because the Surveys feature isn't amazing because it is and it works very well it's just what I'm encouraging you to do is to find things that are a natural fit to your current workflow but never force the technology to do something maybe one that wasn't designed to do or two a little quirky because if there's anything that you design that your user is going to feel like it's not working perfectly you're going to you're going to see them frustrated you're going to hear about it and it's just not a good process overall so your goal would be to look at what you're doing today and see what small changes that you can make to maybe serve those things up at the S365 SharePoint Okay, a quick question here is is there a way that the alert can show you what the change was? I tried this on a wiki page and it just emailed me the entire page without indicating what the change was Yeah, it's a very common question the short answer is no not unless we build out quite a few other things to happen the alert system is flagging that there was a change and especially in a wiki all we would be able to do is to click the notification link head over to the wiki page then immediately click the version control because once you're inside a version control especially on a wiki page you can see all the changes in track change forms Alerts are fairly simple too guys I normally almost treat them only like an email notification they're just not there yet as far as the sophistication level you can do other workflows manual workflows you build them in a product called SharePoint Designer and then you could tease out exactly what you're asking so what I'm saying is instead of using the out of the box alert feature you just build a custom workflow using SharePoint Designer and you could actually do exactly what you're asking is just more manual and that unfortunately is the nature of SharePoint it's like on the surface like it's really great it's an awesome tool but there's always like that excitement too it's like oh now I wanted to do this and it would be awesome if this happened and fortunately the downside of that is sometimes that is like more custom which means you have to load up some other tools to build those out it's not overly difficult if you have a web background or you've programmed even like simple HTML programming you usually can kind of fumble your way through that design and I don't want to forget the huge amount of resources online I'm encouraged by seeing your YouTube channel and there's of course other YouTube channels out there that have great resources on taking your skill set to the next level so always look for those resources I do know for a lot of organizations SharePoint is definitely a new piece of technology for them and that they're really exploring what is possible here the collaborative editing aspect especially for groups working on briefs together is so much easier than track changes I'm glad that you covered that today thank you so much excellent well thank you so much Justin we greatly appreciate it there will be a survey coming after this webinar if you could give us feedback on it we would greatly appreciate it this is one of those series that is new to us this year and if this was useful it's something that we'll look at doing more of in the future any final tips or parting words that you've got here Justin I think the only thing I could encourage is practice practice practice like don't be afraid to get in there and try things out even as an instructor full-time some of my favorite tips are things that students have shared so the important thing to remember is that we are all part of the same team if you learn a really amazing tip or you learn a really cool thing that you can do with technology share it with your colleagues we all benefit from that knowledge share and if you've got questions about this type of stuff please also feel free to publicly ask on the LSN email list I'm going to drop a link to that in the chat right now we've got over 700 people on that list several of those programs are using SharePoint from everything from kind of an internal site for sharing knowledge or brief banks to kind of a benefit site or staff directory that type of thing so if there's something that you would like to do in SharePoint there's a good chance that another organization or someone else from that email list could easily help you and save you a lot of time on it well thank you so much for your time today Justin greatly appreciate it and we look forward to seeing the next in the series here thanks guys everyone have a great afternoon