Industry Partnerships Officer Rhi Tuntevski is used to embracing innovation and change. “Things are always changing for our faculty, there’s so much going on,” she explains. When O365 first came to UTS, Rhi and her team were early Teams adopters. “We thought we’d give it a go for the student industry projects to see if we could bring everyone together.”
The Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation first implemented Teams as a pilot for one specific student project where a number of stakeholders needed to be across the communication process. Teams allowed four key groups to come together: the students who run the project, the industry partners they’re working with, Rhi’s team in Industry Partnerships, and the teaching staff who oversaw the process.
She’s noticed that, for students, Teams is a complimentary platform to Canvas and UTSOnline. “It’s where the discussion piece can happen, the peer-to-peer learning. Somebody can ask the question everybody has been thinking, creating an open dialogue.” She also points out that Teams has helped counteract some “platform fatigue” by acting as a hub for other learning web services.
Following the student project, Rhi and her colleagues adopted Teams as one of their key communication tools for day to day work. “You learn by doing,” Rhi enthuses.
Tips & Tricks
- Teams: There’s a lot of different ways to communicate using Teams. Sure, we all know the difference between chat and conversation, but do you know the difference between a reply and a new conversation? To start a new conversation about a new topic, type in the chat bar at the bottom of the Teams window. If you want to respond directly to what someone has already posted, use reply. That way, your comment will appear directly under the original post.
- OneDrive: Still attaching files to emails, or to your posts in Teams? There’s an easier way. You can share a file from your OneDrive with two clicks. First, click on the three dots next to the file you want to share and select ‘copy link’ for Macs or ‘get a link’ for PCs. This generates a link to the file and copies it to your clipboard, ready to paste into an email or Teams conversation. To learn more about this, and to learn how to manage the privacy of your OneDrive documents, click here.
- Teams: Love the mobile app, but hate the constant notifications? A new feature, Quiet Hours, is coming soon. This feature lets you schedule when you do and don’t want notifications so you can better manage your work-life balance.
Want to be featured in the next Success Story? Discovered a cool O365 tip or trick you want to share in an upcoming newsletter? Email David.Herbert@uts.edu.au! Want more tips and tricks? Check out the newsletter archive here.
Training Sessions
Online training – There’s plenty of training material available from Microsoft or Lynda.com on how best to use O365 apps. If you’ve got a few minutes spare and want to learn more about Teams, check out this great article filled with best practice tips, tricks, and more.
Face to face training – Prefer face to face training? You can request a training session on Teams, Planner, OneDrive, or all three by emailing David.Herbert@uts.edu.au. To see if any training session are coming up, or to register, check the ServiceCatalogue in ServiceConnect.
What’s New?
Office 365 is constantly being updated with new features to increase its functionality, making it easier to collaborate between apps and between people. Have you heard about this new feature?
Stream, the O365 video recording and streaming app, continues to push the boundaries with its AI solutions. Microsoft is committed to providing accessible technology that helps everyone work together. Here are just a few of the features that Stream provides:
- Speaker timelines that use face detection to indicate every place that a person appears within a video so viewers can easily navigate to each speaker in the video
- Speech-to-text and closed captions that capture spoken dialog in a readable form and make content more accessible for everyone
- Transcript search and timecodes that let viewers quickly search and find moments that matter in a video
Stream is available to use for UTS staff now. To access it, just go to portal.office.com and click on the Stream icon.