All Things Viva Insights

As of March of 2022. This is a work in progress, created for our Microsoft 365 Conference Make-a-thon attendees. Thanks for coming! Information is only as current as date above. Use at your own risk. Cheers!

Start Here for Viva Insights Documentation

FAQ – Personal Insights in Teams

FAQ – Personal Insights – The Briefing Email – has info for both IT Pros and User.

FAQ – Manager Insights

FAQ – Leader Insights – also known as My Organization Insights, so don’t be confused.

FAQ – Advanced Insights

Roles in Viva Insights – this has info on “who can do what” which helpful since there are differences in what is possible based on when licenses are assigned. IMPORTANT NOTE: as the documentation states: these are assigned independently, not cumulative and do not roll up.

Glossary

Metrics Descriptions

Best Practices – this is a handy starting point to explore best practices on dealing with things like email overload, manager coaching and customer focus.

Your Organizational Data Upload – this info is for your first one.

Languages supported in Viva – it is more complicated than you think.

Pricing for Viva Insights – Personal Insights come with in all Microsoft 365 E3/A3/E5/A5, Office 365 E1/E3/A3/E5/A5, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Standard/Premium plans. Manager and Leader Insights and Advanced Insights require Viva Insights licenses.

Pricing for Viva Insights Capacity – You get so many capacity units with Advanced Insights to use for custom analysis a month. Viva Insights Capacity can be purchased to give you more if you need it. How Microsoft puts it: Customers receive one capacity unit per licensed user per month. Customers can use these capacity units—pooled at the tenant level—to access advanced insights capabilities, including custom analysis and preconfigured Power BI analysis templates.

Differential Privacy – is about varying data slightly to protect privacy but doing so in a way that doesn’t impact what you’re measuring. Being introduced first with Manager and Leader Insights.

5 Time-Saving Teams Keyboard Shortcuts

Here are five of my favorite Microsoft Teams keyboard shortcuts you can learn today. If five seems like too many, pick three. Just commit to learning them – they’ll improve your Teams life.

Note: I use the same shortcut notation as Microsoft. When a keyboard combination requires two or more keys pressed at the same time, you’ll see the plus sign (+).

Get to the top and search for stuff

Ctrl+E will get you to the top of Teams, to the Search Bar. Once there, you can press / (the forward slash) to invoke commands. If you’re looking for a file you recently worked on but can’t remember the Team and Channel, type /files to see your recent documents. “Do Not Disturb” is there, too. Type /dnd and your status is set.

Helpful On and Off switches

Meetings and calls are no time to be scrambling for the on and off switches. The Teams team has conveniently created shortcuts for your camera and your audio. Toggles are:

Ctrl+Shift+O to turn your camera on and off. As in Control Shift Oh no, my video is on! NOTE: this does not work for the Teams Web app.

Ctrl+Shift+M to mute yourself or unmute. Anything to avoid the dreaded “You’re muted!”

Where’s my files?

To get your files quickly, press Ctrl+6. You will be presented with your recent files, Teams files, and Downloads in addition to your OneDrive. For the Teams Web app use Ctrl+Shift+6.

Zoom (not THAT Zoom)

Need a little boost to your eyesight when working late on a Friday night? Zoom is for you. To zoom in, press Ctrl+= (Control plus equal sign) and to zoom right back out, press Ctrl+- (Control plus minus sign).

To find the keyboard shortcuts in Teams, click on your profile picture and you’ll see it listed on the menu. Or, /keys in the box at the top of Teams will get you the list too.

Keyboard shortcuts save time

See this interesting take on how much time shortcuts save.

Author’s note: This post is a February 2021 revision of a post I wrote back in 2018. I started the article with “We’ve all been there. You’re on a Teams call and an otherwise sweet, normal family member starts up a chainsaw behind you. Or a rant. You lunge for the mouse and frantically look for the mute button!” Things really haven’t changed much! Thank you very much for stopping by.

Five Can’t Miss Yammer Sessions at The SharePoint Conference

In just under a month, I’ll be in Las Vegas attending The SharePoint Conference. In its second year back, the show continues to add valuable content for SharePoint folks but that is in no way its sole purpose. Attendees will have plenty of Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Yammer sessions (and much more) to choose from. I picked five Yammer sessions that I think are can’t miss presentations. Hey, all the sessions look good to me but if asked by a first time attendee or someone new to Yammer, these are my five.

What’s New and What’s Next

This is where you’ll get THE word on the latest Yammer happenings. These product leaders, including Murali Sitaram, the Yammer GM, will lay out their big bets for the product. I am excited to get an update on how they are progressing with weaving Yammer into all of Office 365.

What to expect: A full house and a straight-forward road map update. Don’t miss: Steve Nguyen’s positive messages about the value Yammer brings to customers.

Yammer365NewIcon

How Yammer Security and Management Works Behind the Scenes in a GDPR World

Don’t be put off by the title. If you are battling objections based on security concerns, by the time you leave, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to overcome even the most strident security obstacles. Martina Grom is a seasoned presenter and this session will get you access to one of the planet’s best minds on Yammer.

What to expect: Thoughtful best practices based on years of experience. Don’t miss: the opportunity to ask her your specific questions on Yammer and GDPR.

Hosting and Managing Live Events in Yammer

Live events is a cross product investment that should signal to anyone in your company’s C-suite that Microsoft is serious about employee engagement. This one-two punch of live events and Yammer means your communications and culture initiatives have a modern broadcast tool at their disposal. Very cool but live events can go wrong, so make sure to attend for important tech tips and best practices.

What to expect: a thorough look and demo of live events. Don’t miss: dynamic co-presenters, Michael’s humorous and solid approach and Kasia’s event expertise (TedxSanFrancisco).

How Microsoft Leadership Stays Connected to Their Employees with Yammer

One of the fundamental tenants of enterprise social networking is that, done right, it reduces the power distance between leaders and workforce. As many folks in this ecosystem know, Microsoft has been on a journey to change their culture and Yammer has played a role in that. This session looks to be a lock for on the ground examples of how Microsoft uses Yammer.

What to expect: Great insight from Yammer veteran, Angus Florance. Don’t miss: There may be swag.

Why Yammer is Still the Universe to Me

This is another session presented by Martina Grom. I’ve included it in my top five because this presentation will be a great primer on Yammer’s business value.

What to expect: business stories to take home. Don’t miss: One more chance to get great ESN advice.

The SharePoint Conference is May 21st to May 23rd at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you are planning on going, please consider using my code: SWANN for $50 off. See The SharePoint Conference for more information.

Yammer and SharePoint: Evolving Together

Author’s note, September 2018: When I originally reported on Microsoft announcing SharePoint will be the default file storage location for Yammer, the estimated date for release was August 2018. While this did not happen (it was an estimate, after all) there is news. The Yammer team is seeking a few customers to preview this new feature. Which likely means they are pretty far along. There is no new estimate of general availability but my guess is by end of the calendar year. Here is the roadmap item on the Office 365 Roadmap.

If you are attending Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, John Bacus, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, will be giving a demo of the feature. His session is on Wednesday, September 26th at 2:00 PM. Check out session BRK3219 for more details.

I am just back from a wildly successful SharePoint Conference North America held last week in sunny Vegas and I’d like to report some news on the Yammer and SharePoint front in case you missed it. While I was bummed at the length of the barbecue line at the B-52s concert held poolside, I was not disappointed at what I heard from Dan Holme (@danholme) and Steve Nguyen (@espnguyen) on the state of Yammer, specifically its better together story with SharePoint.

Yammer

Empower and Connect

Yammer’s mission is to “empower and connect every person across an organization to maximize their impact.” In order to deliver on this, and to maximize their own impact (to steal a phrase) Yammer is teaming with other Microsoft technologies, including SharePoint. This is a good thing. Why? Because Yammer’s core value prop is the conversation modality. The public or private conversation that you can have with people inside or outside of your organization. But it needs friends to extend its potential.

With that in mind, here is what I hear when I read the above mission statement: empower (people) and connect (them through conversations) to maximize their impact (to deliver business value). All the words in parenthesis are mine, put there for emphasis. Yammer can transform an organization when in the hands of innovative, determined change agents. Now imagine that same capability mashed with care with SharePoint goodness and you can see the value it can bring to customers.

Three Key Points

Core Investment Areas

The message is clear: Microsoft recognizes the strong business value for customers by investing in what Yammer does well and lean on SharePoint for its content management strength. Yammer is spending its time and betting on the following areas:

  1. Employee engagement and connections
  2. Being the social layer of Office 365
  3. Being enterprise-grade with security and compliance

Employee engagement and connections

A key focus area is to strengthen that all-important two-way conversation. To make it rich and relevant. To make it live and breathe. if you are familiar with the concept of a YamJam, just note that it is about to get a big boost. Coming soon: the ability for users to hold live townhall events using Stream, in Yammer. This is a big deal. Known as “Broadcast Meetings in Yammer” this road map item can be found here, under the “In Development” area. This is not just for traditional top down meetings; imagine the power of learning among and between colleagues.

The Social Layer of Office 365

This is where we really see that “evolving together” story unfold. Soon, SharePoint file storage will be turned on by default for Yammer. When you store a file via Yammer, that file will be stored in SharePoint. This feature will begin shipping in August 2018. You’ll want to have Office 365 Groups enabled to take advantage of it. This makes a lot of sense. Yammer should be about the conversation among colleagues and making connections. This lets SharePoint do what it does best, hitting on its core capabilities of enterprise-grade content management.

Yammer understands the need to make content in your feed engaging. The Yammer team is working hard to bring rich previews of SharePoint documents into Yammer. No stated timing on this yet, but I plan on keeping on eye on this for the customers I work with over at tyGraph.

Finally, in the works, is a significant improvement to the social experience in SharePoint, a native Yammer feed, described as very much like the feed in Yammer, but in SharePoint. This crossover moment is the strongest signal yet that Yammer is becoming the social layer.

Enterprise-grade Security and Compliance

Along with the splash of live video for townhalls and the social layer in SharePoint, Yammer will continue to invest in being enterprise-grade with security and compliance. Yammer has already done work to provide user management using Azure Active Directory (AAD) and the ability to create dynamic groups based on AAD properties. One further example, the “Erase User” functionality, described as the ability to erase a user’s name and personal information as well as their usage data in Yammer is here, just in time for GDPR.

By the way, the SharePoint Conference in Vegas? That is a thing again. Hope to see you there in May of 2019. In the meantime, I will continue to report on these evolving changes. I’d be interested to hear what new capabilities are you looking forward to?

Microsoft Teams: A Review of What’s New for April 2018

April saw a handful of new features released for Microsoft Teams. In this post, I’ll take a closer look at the uses for four of them and add a brief mention of the others.

First: two ways to get to “What’s New”

In my blog on the command box, I mentioned that a good keyboard shortcut to know is “alt-k”. That will get you to the top of the Teams UI. From there, if you type “/whatsnew” you will see the latest the Teams team has added or changed.

Whats New

A second way: click on your profile picture in the upper right, then “Help” and there you’ll see “What’s New” on the top line.

“Here is the chat I wanted you to see…”

No question, Teams has a strong chat feature, and if you are like me and my colleagues, we can get chatty in a hurry and I often find myself needing to point a teammate to a specific post. New this month is the ability to go to a specific chat message, copy a link and then drop that link off to colleague so they can quickly hop to the linked post.

To copy a link is super simple, just click the ellipsis of the desired post and click “Copy Link” and you’re set.

Once you post the link, you’ll see the name of the OP (original poster) followed by a colon and a chunk of the message plus the Team name, Channel, and date time stamp of the original post. See example below:

CopyLink feature

Two new ways to get chatting

Speaking of chatting, Teams added two ways to kick off a chat with a teammate. Have you ever been reading through a channel and wanted to chat with a specific person in a thread? All you have to do is mouse over their profile picture and their contact card will pop up. Message box is at the bottom of the card. Type your message and hit reply. The message will show up in either a new chat or an existing chat with that person, (re: Chat area in the left navigation pane).

The second way is to use the command box. As mentioned above, you can get there quickly with an alt-k. Once in the command box, at mention them, by typing the “at” key, “@” and their name; hit return and you’re ready to message.

The key to both of these shortcuts is that you don’t lose context. An important concept that the Teams team and other product folks are getting a handle on is the critical nature of keeping you, the user, contextually close to your current task. Losing context means having to endure the “switching cost” of leaving one task and picking up another. Like leaving email to fact check something on the web only to lose a half hour catching up on the Kardashians.

Team Owners, show the team where to start with favorite channels

If you are a team owner, you can auto-favorite up to ten channels for your team. So, let’s say you have eight channels in your team, but three of them are critical for teammates to have. You can auto-favorite them so they show up for all team members. Just know that your teammates can unfavorite them later.

One more new feature worth noting

You now have the ability to get a reminder if your team is expiring. But, I’m jumping the gun a bit here. You first have to have the Azure Active Directory policy that allows an expiration date to be set, turned on. This is a premium feature of AAD. There are two references you should check out if interested. Here is one on the Office 365 Group Expiration Policy  and you might want have a look at this one too, the quickstart on AAD Premium.

Finally, as I usually mention, I am interested in how others use collaboration tools like Teams and Yammer. If you have something to share, drop me a note. Thanks for checking out my blog.

 

 

 

Key Takeaways: Microsoft’s Employee Engagement Summit 2018

The recent Employee Engagement Summit, hosted by Microsoft had a galvanizing moment for me, an old school social collaborator with links back to the early days of Yammer, Jive, and Newsgator. That moment came in the opening frames as host Andrew Anton, of Microsoft, laid out the key themes:

  • Leadership and Clarity of Purpose
  • Open Communication and Teamwork
  • Sustained Engagement through Empowerment

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It all sounded so familiar…so right. As I listened, the themes of working out loud, transparency and trust began to coalesce. Yes, I had heard it before and that isn’t a bad thing. The messages I was hearing today reminded me of Responsive.org, a group of forward thinkers who created a manifesto that said, in essence, there has to be a better way of working, and here it is.

What was so galvanizing for me was that so many organizations are figuring it out and some of the companies represented this day, were using an old reliable friend (Yammer) and the new kid (Microsoft Teams). And they are nailing it. I will discuss three examples in this article.

I have to tie up a loose end first. There are strong Yammer (and Microsoft) genes in the founders of Responsive.org: Adam Pisoni and Matthew Partovi to name two. The cool thing, the thing that makes me smile, is that they were right and now we are seeing it mainstream. Forgive me for glazing over a decade or more of enterprise social network (ESN) history (I am leaving out a long list of amazing and relevant thinkers) but these are exciting times to be a believer in ESN and organizational change at scale. Not saying perfect, but exciting to see the progress we are making in this space.

KFC’s Colonel was real and you should be too

People aren’t going to trust a brand just because you say they should. According to Jonathan D’Souza, People Capability Director at KFC South Pacific, people want real stories from real people. They took an “inside out” approach to getting brand trust. When employees are authentic about themselves and what the brand promises, then you’ve got something.

As KFC in Australia worked to discover what it meant to be engaged, they found employees wanted these two things above all else:

  • To have a voice
  • To feel connected

D’Souza and team saw that Yammer could help them do that. They also saw the need for team members to engage with each other and to not count on the head office to always drive it. D’Souza’s message: trust your people. A data point, they have had to take down only .03% of posts from their Yammer network.

He gave two examples of engagement within their network. Feeling connected comes from being recognized, like when you’re recognized on Yammer by the CEO, Nikki Lawson (by the way, she is a top ten contributor on their network). Having a voice means being able to ask the Chief People Officer, Rob Phipps, questions via their #ASKROB campaign – and get answers back.

All good stuff, but the compelling part of  his talk came when he tied engagement to business outcomes. He gave the following example. Safety is a topic that is very important to all organizations and a serious one. To get team members to engage in safety awareness, KFC Australia took a somewhat comedic approach with good results. They created a corporately funny video of safety do’s and don’ts. Result: after the video was released organization wide, they saw a 28% increase in safety incident reporting.

Microsoft Teams coming of age

Having just passed its one year birthday, Teams is making significant headway in organizations of all sizes. Accenture, the mega-firm of consultants, is using Teams in a variety of ways. Jason Warnke described its use as a “digital cockpit.” I see where he’s coming from but not my favorite Teams descriptor. Makes it feel like we’re all flying our own plane. Teams is about what we can do together.

Farren Roper then took the audience through one of their Teams use cases, recruiting on campus. He briefly showed:

  • A planning channel to share documents
  • Using chat for messaging and key for them: inline message translation
  • Co-editing documents and having conversations in the same context
  • Starting an online meeting and bring those docs and conversations with you
  • Recording the meeting for colleagues who weren’t able to meet on the fly

More about their Teams journey can be found here.

Turns out, the folks that make Oreos are big Yammer users

Russell Dyer, the VP of Global Communications at Mondelez International, the makers of Oreos, Cadbury and many other foods I can’t seem to avoid, had the line of the day about Yammer. He was describing, that part of their competitive advantage was their diverse, geographic footprint. Good, but presents challenges. With a base this diverse and wide, there is an increase of virtual relationships of all types that develop, virtual reporting lines, teams, etc. Yammer helps with this challenge: “Yammer shrinks our world and enables those human conversations on a level that no other tool provides.”

russell

He went on to say that, “There is nothing more powerful than arming a colleague with a tool with which, they can tell their own story.”

Dyer gave a Yammer use case that will resonate with anyone in retail. Their sales folks are rarely in offices and often find themselves in stores or with suppliers. They found Yammer really helpful in sharing photos of displays. This sharing has led to new conversations and has started dialogues that didn’t happen previously.

One more takeaway

There was much more in the one hour event than I have here, so I urge you to go watch the whole thing, especially the interview with Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan of Microsoft. She described the cultural changes that have been occurring at Microsoft. In short, her messages were: focus on a growth mindset, be customer obsessed, and be diverse and inclusive. If you want to know more, here is a link to an article Hogan wrote  on cultural change.

I am always interested in hearing about how organizations are using Yammer and Microsoft Teams. If you have an experience you’d like to share, by all means, comment below.

 

Notifications in Microsoft Teams: Understanding Your Options

Part of being productive is knowing what you need to know, when you need to know it. Microsoft Teams has a healthy list of notifications to help you with that, but the options can be overwhelming. In this blog, I’ll break down those options so you can see what makes the most sense for you.

Where are they? 

Notifications are easy to find. First, click your profile picture. Then select settings, then notifications. Your choices begin there.

Notifications

Three Categories

Notifications are clumped in three categories: messages, mentions, and the catch-all, other. There are thirteen features that you can tinker with and decide what notifications to receive. Each of those come with variations, which I will explain soon. But first…

What can I just turn off?

There are nine that can be. Here they are:

  1. Channel Mentions
  2. Team Mentions
  3. Chat Messages
  4. Replies to conversations I started
  5. Replies to conversations i replied to
  6. Likes
  7. Team Membership changes
  8. Team Role changes
  9. Sound

What are my options? 

Most of your choices come down to these three. You can be notified:

  1. In the banner and email
  2. Just via the banner
  3. Or just leave it to be shown only in the feed

Those scenarios cover the nine I mentioned previously plus Personal Mentions and Followed Channels.

Three from “Other”

There are three features or options that don’t fit that pattern.

  1. Sound
  2. Email Frequency
  3. Chat with Skype for Business

Sound can be just call, mention, or chat or it can be all or off. Frequency of email can be as soon as possible, every ten minutes or every hour. Finally, Chat with Skype for Business can either be enabled or disabled. If you change that one, you’ll need to restart the app.

Full Options List for Notifications

Here are all the options for notifications as they relate to the feature listed.

All Notifications

 

For your most productive self, how do you set your notifications? I’d love to hear about your Microsoft Team experiences, drop me a note below!

Using the Command Line in Microsoft Teams

“Once you know what you are doing, productivity becomes your one true competitive advantage.” David Allen, the Getting Things Done guy said that. For our purposes, I am going to assume you know what you want to get done. My purpose here is to talk about productivity shortcuts coming out of the Microsoft Teams team that I find particularly useful. In my last blog, I wrote about five favorite Teams tips. Today, I’ll focus on the command line, that open box at the top of the Teams UI.

Slash and At ( aka / and @ )

There are currently seventeen slash commands. I am not sure that is their official name but to invoke them you type a “/”. According to the documentation, there are two such “commands” – the slash and the “@” command so a distinction is required.

commands

Let’s get right to my five favorite slash commands and how they will help your daily Teams productivity.

/activity

When I am trying to find something one of my colleagues posted, I can often recall who posted, I just can’t remember where. That is the scenario this handy command covers. I type in /activity in the command line and the name of my team member and Teams will list me their recent activity, including where, what and when they posted.

/call

Yes, Microsoft Teams has speed dial. It is the /call command. Try it. type /call then the name of your teammate and hit return. You’ll start ringing them immediately. Faster than you can say “butt dial” you’ll be connected. This is a serious power tool.

/saved

You know that moment where you need to just dog ear the corner of a book so you can pick it back up later? Teams can do that for you with the bookmark feature. To retrieve those bookmarks, invoke the /saved command. It lists your bookmarks lickety-split and provides navigation back to those posts in context.

/files

Similar to my scenario for using the activity slash command, I can usually recall a file that I worked on recently, I just can’t remember where (again). Hitting /files returns me a list of recent files that I can choose from and dive back in.

/org

When you need to find someone, try /org. Type it in and then start typing the name of the person you’re looking for. This slash command has the comfort of the old company phone book, but faster and with the person’s place in the organization in an easily navigable form.

Keep in mind…

There are a dozen more slash commands. You can get to the command line quickly by using the keyboard shortcut, “ctrl + e“. These commands are desktop and web features and not yet available in the mobile app. The Teams team is very open to ideas, so if you have a thought for a command, drop them a note.

I’d be interested in how you use the command line. Please leave a comment or send me a note with your ideas. Thanks!

Five Tips for Using Microsoft Teams

I work for a software company and we took the plunge with Microsoft Teams as an experiment to better understand what the platform had to offer (we create reporting and analytics solutions). Since that day, some nine months ago, we have settled in as daily users, leveraging Teams as our primary comms and collab tool.

Here are five quick tips for getting more out of Teams. This is by no means a “Top 5” but rather five tips that have helped shape our adoption and ongoing engagement.

Learn One Keyboard Shortcut a Week

Keyboard shortcuts can be hard to learn, but learning a few as you go, can pay big dividends. Do you have a weekly team meeting? Set aside 10 minutes before or after to learn a new one. Start with Alt-H. This gem gets you help and not your Dad’s WordPerfect manual kind of help. You are now a click away from starting a chat with T-Bot, perusing online help, release notes, an FAQ and my favorite, videos. By the way, T-Bot can help you with “keyboard shortcut a week” goal, too.

tbot

Become a Headline Writer

One of our most quickly accepted best practices was agreeing to start new chats with a headline. This helps you identify what a thread is all about without having to go too far in the text. When I say write a headline, I really do mean, put yourself in the shoes of the reader. What would help someone get the gist of the conversation? Resist the temptation to be clever (save that for choosing memes).

headline

Spend Time on your Teams and Channel Naming Strategy

Some of us are secret taxonomists. We love curating content and we KNOW our way is the best. Unfortunately, the Lone Wolf approach can lead to confusion among your team. Sense-check your structure. Since my company creates software, we have a Product team and each of the channels within it, are specific products. This way, the team knows exactly where to post to maximize the chance for a response.

Fine tune your notifications

Fine tune your notifications before you start and then every once in a while to ensure you are getting the pings you want and none you don’t. Super easy to do. Just click on your face in the upper right hand corner (as of this writing) and you’ll find Notifications under Settings.

Need to let the whole team in on something?

You can “at mention” the whole gang by typing @team within a channel. This is a powerful command so best to use sparingly. On the other hand, individual “at mentions” is the obvious way to help our team find chats aimed at them. That big white @ symbol on a red background that sits astride chats, is a nice visual clue as well.

at mentioned

I’d be interested to hear what you’ve found that works for your team. Drop me a note below!

(Blog notes: While Microsoft Teams is our front and center tool, we are equally big Yammer users. Our tyGraph Customer Network is Yammer-based. Gifs in this blog were made with Screentogif).

Libraries, Lynda, LinkedIn and Learning

As I sat in a We Work Unbound session this past Friday, I got some knowledge dropped on me that was so intriguing, I woke up early on Saturday morning and drove to my local library so I could get my check-out privileges back.

IMG_5140

Here it is. If you are a resident of just about any county in Minnesota, and you have a library card, you also have access to lynda.com, the online learning home of over 6,000 courses for free. Yep, free.

No matter what your current gig calls for, you should always be feeding your brain. Not only to cover off “just in case” but to get your mind right for whatever your day brings. Getting outside of what is warm and cozy for you and pushing on should be a muscle in continual practice. Which is why I found myself in a conference room with people not from my company to occupy the same space for most of a random Friday (again, see We Work Unbound).

As our host, Melanie Hohertz (@Hohertz3) was establishing the baseline for LinkedIn profiles, she casually mentions this lynda.com deal. If you’re not familiar: lynda.com started in 1995 by Lynda Weinman as a way to support her books and the classes she taught. It has grown to a massive learning enterprise, which led to a LinkedIn acquisition back in 2015.

The critical bit here is two-fold. Libraries remain as awesome in 2017 as they were when Andrew Carnegie was building over 1,600 of them here in the US at the turn of the previous century. Libraries are important public spaces, especially as public spaces are becoming more rare. This leaves libraries as Donald Barclay states, “…perhaps the last remaining indoor public spaces where an individual can remain from opening until closing without needing any reason to be there and without having to spend any money.”

IMG_5141

The second critical piece: maintaining skills and learning new ones is on me. Can’t put that on my boss or my company. I gotta show up and learn. Lynda.com is going to help me do that.

My first stop, my friend Steve Nguyen’s (@espnguyen) Lynda course, “Getting Work Done in #Office365.” This is a course that runs just under two hours and was co-authored with Steve Somers (@ricksteve) on being more productive using Microsoft’s Office 365 platform.

Time to feed my brain.