The best Microsoft Ignite to date

10/10/201810/10/2018Ståle Hansen Leave a comment

I had a blast at Microsoft Ignite 2018! Here are some reasons why I think it was the best to date:

The product groups were accessible and always available for feedback. If you went to the different product group booth you would find prominent members available to chat and discuss their products.
Less walking distance, since everything was organized in the same building. This is a great improvement over all other the Microsoft Ignite’s the previous years
The focus om community engagement was apparent this year with Community hours and available podcast booths and locations. Even more community members got to share their experience in breakout sessions, meetup sessions, and theater sessions. The community hours had even more people from the product groups join and you got to ask your burning questions and have a great discussion

Microsoft Ignite 2018 group photo with the Microsoft Teams Product Group and MVP’s

This is at least my experience and I may be biased as I got to have a great time delivering three theater sessions, a meetup, guest two podcasts and spend time at the Microsoft Teams booth. But still, compared to the previous years, the vibe during this year Microsoft Ignite was great. If you are thinking of attending next year, make sure you register as soon as possible, for it is going to be awesome. You can pre-register for November 4-8, 2019, in my favorite vacation location, Orlando

Links to my session recordings and slide decks

I also had the pleasure of bringing all of CloudWay AS to Orlando this year and had great fun together with Jan Ketil Skanke and Alexander Holmeset. I think networking is a big part of conferences such as Microsoft Ignite, that is why we co-hosted Norwegian networking event at Bahama Breeze together with KPMG, Pexip and Microsoft Norway. Read about our activities here

Slides and demo oneliners from NIC2018 now online

07/02/201810/02/2018Ståle Hansen Leave a comment

At Nordic Infrastructure Conference 2018 in Oslo, I had the honor of talking about Microsoft Teams and OneNote in two packed sessions. I got some awesome feedback after my sessions and heard that people learned something. That’s the reason I do these talks and want to continue to speak at conferences like this. You can download all slides from the conference via GitHub, which I realize is a super way to share content after a conference.

Download my slides and PowerShell oneliners from my Control Microsoft Teams like a Boss session

Download my slides from my OneNote LifeHack session

My company, CloudWay had a booth at NIC and we had a blast talking secure productivity and give away thousands of mobility swag :)

How to use Microsoft Flow to move email to OneNote

07/12/201707/12/2017Ståle Hansen 5 Comments

The send to OneNote plugin in Outlook for PC and Mac is awesome. The problem is when you are not in front of a computer and need to tag an email for processing later when you are on other platforms. My approach to solve this is to use flagging of email and send that to my collection section in OneNote using Microsoft Flow. In that way, I know when I have processed it and I know I can find it again in OneNote for when I process my OneNote and create actionable tasks.

Here is how to get started with using Microsoft Flow for moving flagged emails to your Collection section in Microsoft OneNote that is stored in OneDrive for Business in Office 365.

Log on to your Office 365 portal
Click on the Flow icon to get started
- requires that Flow is enabled for your tenant and your user
Search for Outlook, because that is our trigger
Choose the trigger for when flagging an email in your inbox
Click on Next Step and search for OneNote (Business)
Choose create page in section
Choose the notebook that is stored in OneDrive for Business
Choose the section you want to store it in, which should be your collection section
In order to get a good input from the email you need to paste in some HTML code in order to get subject as title and more info from the email in to OneNote
- Attachments will not be copied in to OneNote, I think it is a good thing, so that your notebook will not get bloated
- here is the HTML code you can paste in to the page content as body
  - https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/OneNote-Create-a-page-in-section-with-Page-title-field/idi-p/25695
- Should look like this
From here, save the flow
- it takes 10-15 minutes for first run
- The free version runs every 15 minutes, the Office 365 flow version runs every 5 minutes
- For Office 365 the number of times a flow can run is tenant wide and is aggregated by the number of user licenses in the tenant and is 2000 times per user per month
- One user can consume a lot more runs than 2000, but the average is 2000 per user per month
- Read more her: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/#plan-feature-table
The flow with flagging of emails are only run when you actually do the flagging, so you will only consume a run when you actually do the flagging

Check out my OneNote LifeHacks video from Ignite on how to set this up.

References

Make sure you also check out my OneNote LifeHacks YouTube series
Check out how I work with OneNote and GTD
About OneNote, about GTD, about the Pomodoro Technique

Looking for coaching on being more productive with OneNote and get more stuff done, connect with me at CloudWay

Launching OneNote LifeHacks YouTube series

17/08/2017Ståle Hansen 1 Comment

I am starting a YouTube series called OneNote LifeHacks. I will share detailed tips on how to set up OneNote to work for you. My system has 5 steps

You wanting to change your habits
Capture to OneNote collection section from all platform
Processing and organizing information
Prioritize using custom tags and find tags to create todo lists
Executing on the lists and induce flow using the Pomodoro Technique

The system is heavily inspired of Getting Things Done, Inbox Zero and the Pomodoro Technique, and you can incorporate good habits that resonates with well with you. It is a robust system and all you have to do is to get started with the capture process and the rest you can do as a bonus

Check out my OneNote LifeHacks explained video

The YouTube series is based on my popular OneNote talk from MVP Community Connect in Madrid 2017 and my article on getting started with OneNote in structured way that I wrote in august 2016. The article has more than 6000 views and are still very popular. The video has over 11500 views and over 130 likes with good feedback. This is very motivational and makes me want to share more of my tips and tricks to succeed with OneNote and get stuff done using some productivity methodologies like GTD and the Pomodoro Technique

Catch me at Microsoft Ignite 2017 where I am talking about OneNote LifeHacks in a 20 minute theater talk. Will be happy to share tips and tricks in OneNote productivity