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The New Office is here and so is the new Garage Series for IT Pros. Join our seasoned desktop specialist hosts every Wednesday in the Microsoft Garage.  Watch weekly as they: push the limits with XStream Installs of Office from the Air, Land and Water; inform you with never-before seen demos and answer your toughest questions – including commentary from Office engineers and Mark Russinovich. Check out  this trailer for a peek at what’s in store in the series.

Exciting press release published yesterday as well as a set or articles on Yammer’s momentum, also please check Yammer’s newly designed customer success page: https://www.yammer.com/customers   Yammer Accelerates Momentum Following Microsoft Acquisition Sample of articles published on February 20th: Yammer tops 7M users, sales spike after Microsoft deal – GeekWire, Todd Bishop Microsoft: Yammer Generates Big Business After Buy – eWeek, Pedro Hernandez Yammer has 7 million users as SharePoint integration continues – CITEworld, Matt Rosoff Yammer Touts Record Year – Seattle Times, Janet Tu  

Thursday morning, 2/21/2013, beginning at 7 AM Pacific time, the Office 365 Community will be offline for about 15 minutes, to deploy some of the changes I mentioned in the We’re making changes to the Office 365 Community  blog post. We expect the community to be offline for about 15 minutes. If you try to access the community during that time, you’ll see a maintenance message. When we return, you’ll see our new list of blogs, forums, and wikis, and the existing forum threads and wiki posts will be moved into the new structure. We’ll need to rebuild the community search index after this reorganization. The first search results will be available about 15 minutes after the site returns. It will take several hours to fully index the community. Thanks for your patience while we improve our community. Sign in and leave a comment to let us know what you think.

Audience: Live@edu; Office 365 for education Editor’s Note: Please be sure that the contact information for your institution is up to date to be alerted to key Live@edu to Office 365 upgrade information. Sign in to the Service Management Portal (SMP)   and update the critical notification field with all updated contacts for your institution.  You may already know about the Live@edu upgrade to Office 365 for education and the new features and enhancements available to your institution. Since this upgrade builds on existing Live@edu deployments, there’s no need to move mailboxes, calendars, or contacts, and no need to re-provision accounts. Even better, you don’t have to wait to upgrade during weekends or vacations; when the upgrade starts, users can count on continued access to email, SkyDrive and Messenger/Skype throughout the upgrade process. But did you know there are new resources to help you inform and educate your users? New resources include : Upgrade End User Kit : We’ve created this kit to help you inform your users about what to expect with the upgrade, and to promote Office 365 for education at your institution. Get templates for emails, posters, quick reference cards, website content, and more. You can tailor your messages to your audience and include your school’s branding. Two Account Video : You’ll also want to share this video with your users to explain the functionality of their accounts after the upgrade—the institution account (Office 365) and a personal account to access SkyDrive and Messenger/Skype. After the upgrade, both accounts will have the same password. A user can change the password for their school account without it changing the password for their personal account. If your institution was invited to upgrade to Office 365, get prepared and start the upgrade for more control: Download the upgrade planning worksheet to more easily estimate how much time you will need for key tasks required before, during, and after the upgrade. Review additional resources on the Upgrade Center and complete the before upgrade checklist .    Sign into the Service Management Portal (SMP) and click Upgrade to start the process.         For hands-on training to understand the upgrade process, including Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) setup, you can schedule a demo . We look forward to upgrading you so you can extend your Live@edu investment and enable your students, faculty, and staff to communicate and collaborate easier with the latest Microsoft technology.

For the last several months, we’ve been busily designing and building improvements to make it easier for all of us to use our Office 365 community. We’ll start rolling out these changes in the next few weeks. Watch this blog for news about these changes a week or so before they’re released. Here’s a list of the first changes you’ll see. Click the links below for more details. Consolidate our blogs Make it easier to use and manage our forums Match forums and wikis Consolidate our blogs We use our blogs like billboards along the highway, to drive attention to new features, events, and what’s happening with Office 365. Our blog audience is Office 365 customers, partners, and anyone interested in what’s going on with Office 365. We currently have three blogs: Office 365 Technical Blog Archived Microsoft Office 365 Blog The Grid blog The Office 365 Technical Blog is the one place in our community that you can view to find out what’s going on with Office 365. Our audience is Office 365 customers, and those who support and develop for it. We’re focusing our blog publishing work on this blog. We encourage you to subscribe to this blog to stay up-to-date with Office 365. The Archived Microsoft Office 365 Blog contains posts that were moved to the Office 365 blog. We have not published to it for a year, so we’re going to turn it off. The Grid blog is where we publish contributions from our Grid members. We’ve decided to close this blog and publish all of our Grid member posts on the Office 365 Technical blog. Make it easier to use and manage our forums The Office 365 forums are where customers post questions and where we and our customers engage in discussions. The forums are monitored by Office 365 Support, MVPs, and members of the Office 365 product teams. The Office 365 forums are currently organized into categories, with several forums in each category, for a total of 37 forums. Your feedback told us that it’s hard to decide where to post, and to know where to look for information. In response, we’re flattening our forum structure by removing categories, and we’re reducing the number of forums to 15. There will be one forum for each major service or area of interest. All existing forum posts will be moved into the new forum structure, so we won’t lose any information. The Office 365 forums are available in all the languages in which we offer forum support, and we’re constantly adding new languages. Match forums and wikis We use wikis to post information by Microsoft contributors very quickly and to publish information that will appear in the Office 365 portal. We’ve added new wikis to support some of our new services, and we’ve paired wikis with forums where possible, so it’s easy for you to find information related to specific services. This will also make it easier for the service teams to engage in discussions and manage the information they present. We want to hear from you Sign in to post a comment below and let us know what you think. Feel free to share any ideas about how we can continue to improve this community.

Mark your calendars for this event on February 27th: Don’t miss the Feb. 27 Virtual Launch Event for the new Office 365 for business #Office365 Please find below a summary of recent case studies we published during the past weeks and yes plenty more to come!: Xerox Uses Social Networking to Quickly Share Ideas, Save Time, Spur Innovation Westfield Uses Social Networking to Boost Teamwork and Customer Satisfaction Global Environmental Organization Uses Social Networking to Help Protect the Planet Manhattan Associates – Solutions Provider Weds Social Functionality with Business App, Boosts Bottom Line

Just in case you aren’t keeping up with the posts on the Project Support blog – head on over to https://blogs.technet.com/b/projectsupport/archive/2013/02/14/microsoft-project-server-2007-2010-and-2013-february-2013-cu-announcement.aspx for the details of the February 2012 Cumulative Updates (CU) for Project and Project Server 2007, 2010 and 2013.  As mentioned previously, we are releasing earlier in the month – and plan to match “Patch Tuesday” (the second Tuesday of the month) in the even months.

To sign up for this webcast please download and save the attached calendar invite below where you will find the Webcast Meeting information.  Ignite Webcasts are online sessions led by Microsoft Office 365 Product Managers, Engineers and Support staff. The Ignite webcast series addresses Office 365 technical subjects and scenarios and is beneficial to anyone who wants to increase their knowledge of the Office 365 suite. View the Ignite Site for more information about Ignite programs and webcasts. You can view past Ignite Webcast sessions and materials here and be sure to see upcoming Ignite Webcasts on the Ignite Events Page .     Our latest Office Ignite Webcast discusses Office 365 migrations. We will get an overview of migration capabilities, limitations and available tools. Some of the migrations discussed will include Cutover and Staged migrations. This is a great opportunity to ask questions and join a discussion with our Microsoft presenter. Bring your questions! Our webcast will be led by Daniel Kenyon-Smith. Daniel is an Office 365 Architect in Microsoft Consultancy Services in the UK. Daniel works with large enterprise customers to help them migrate to Office 365. You can view Daniel’s last Ignite Webcast presentation here . Remember, to sign up for this webcast please  download and save the attached calendar invite below . We are excited to see you there!    —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Presenter :  Daniel Kenyon-Smith, Office 365 Architect in Microsoft Consultancy Services in the UK.   Date/Time:  Thursday February 21 st , at 12:00 PM Pacific Time . (1 Hour presentation) Live Meeting Information: ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Join online meeting https://join.microsoft.com/meet/v-joshto/F00T8BQY Join by Phone  +14257063500        +18883203585          Find a local number   Conference ID: 27579341    Forgot your dial-in PIN?  |    First online meeting?      [1033])!]   Audience: Office 365 for professionals and small businesses Office 365 for enterprises

Pat Malatack (Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation) has a comprehensive series of webcasts on extending the JS Grid in Project Web App. Note:   This blog post was originally created Monday, April 19, 2010. The webcasts were missing for the past several months, but have been reinstated on the Microsoft Events site ( https://msevents.microsoft.com/ ). MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 1 of 3) (Level 400) Tuesday, April 20, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the first webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we focus on initializing custom grid code and interactions between the grid and the Project Web App Ribbon. In particular, we show you how to add additional functionality to the Project Center.   MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 2 of 3) (Level 400) Thursday, April 22, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the second webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we focus on the use of events and delegates to interact with the timesheet grid in a way that allows for the addition of custom features and functionality to that page.   MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 JS Grid Extensibility: Project Web App (Part 3 of 3) (Level 400) Tuesday, April 27, 2010 1:00 P.M.-2:00 P.M. Pacific Time This is the third webcast in a three-part series on extending grid pages in Microsoft Office Project Web App. In this webcast, we walk you through more grid customizations, including adding custom commands to the column header dropdown and custom row header states.

It’s been a busy past few weeks in the Enterprise Social Networking #esn world, but I wanted to take a quick pause to celebrate the consumer release of Office, more information below, in the meantime please find below a picture from my desk with some of my favorite products! Microsoft Releases Office 365 Home Premium Office 365: The Next Bold Step