Office 365 Tutorial – Starting to understand the tools

Whats up friends!

I have been acquiring these tools over the years, you DO NOT need to rush out and buy all of this at one time to be successful. You should just seek to add these items, or items like these to your kit, for the purposes I’m about to outline with you. This shouldn’t be scary, think of it as a list of cool shit to acquire along the way to make your stuff better and better

So we have two classes of tools.. The Hardware, and the Software

First up lets talk Hardware, which we will break down into camera stuff and studio stuff…

What are we using, and why are we using it?

Camera(s)

  1. Canon 5DMk3 DSLR – This is the main camera. This is for Photography & Studio Video. This is the centerpiece to our content creation for videos like this video about Microsoft Flow Approvals and Cognitive Services
  2. GoPro Hero 6 – The beautiful point and click video camera for grabbing footage while on the move  like during this Microsoft Flow Tutorial or doing easy time lapse.
  3. Nikon D5100 – Our second shooter, warm, light, easy to use anywhere.
  4. iPhone 8+ – Want to grab some quick slow-mo, time-lapse, or cant afford any of the other items? This thing is beautiful, use it!
  5. DJI Inspire 1 Drone – This one is the least “needed” but can add the most BANG to your video productions. Want to show off some 4K nature footage, Shoot a commercial about hiking, or have a camera without limits.. this is the tool!

Studio Equipment

  1. Lighting Kit – Obviously, to do video well, lights are important.. my latest kit was around $85 on Amazon. It’s not the best, but it does the trick for now.
  2. Microphone(s) – I bought a $150 shotgun mic and a $18 iPhone compatible lapel microphone. Again, not the best, but its better than nothing.. Promise.
  3. Props – You need a well lit area and you should probably have some stuff in it! Don’t make it too plain unless you can fill that space alone with your personality. And if you can, go on with your bad self!
  4. Computers – You’ll need one of these so you can edit your videos.. create graphics and assets, and use more than one screen hopefully.. I know i like 2+

Software & Services

  1. Adobe Creative Cloud – Want to edit videos? use Photoshop or Illustrator? Want to be successful in being creative… You need this. I sprung for the full suite, cause… why not have it all?
  2. Office 365 Business Premium – Very similarly to wanting to be successful in creative and having to have the Adobe suite… Want to be successful in business? You need to have Office 365 at some level. It offers cloud based solutions for everything from Email in exchange, to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and my favorite tool of all… Microsoft Flow – Flow is what allows us to build process automation, so the things i would normally have to do over and over again, i can just have Flow do them for me! I will talk more about this more in depth in future posts, but for now lets discuss the different items included in the 365 Business Premium Package that i am going to start using right away.
    • OneNote – We will use OneNote as a central information repository. A place to store meeting notes, helpful links and shared credentials
    • Microsoft Planner- Planner will be where we project manage. We will set up various “buckets” like Backlog, Planning, In-Progress, Needs Review, and Done – this way we both know where all projects are in the various stages of life, and can have a quick way to provide project tracking.
    • SharePoint Online – SharePoint will be a huge part of what we do. We will create lists (Think spreadsheets) for tracking all kinds of things, and all of our shared document space will live here too.
    • Teams – Tea,s is the hub. This is where conversation happens. This is where we will pin our Planner and OneNote tabs for easy access. This is where we will do 80% of all of our communication around projects and planning.
    • Microsoft Flow – Flow is the glue that allows us to connect all of these various tools. With Flow we can do things like… “When a planner item is moved to the “Needs Approval” bucket, do an Approval workflow. or, When someone fills out the form on my website, send them an email in return thanking them for joining and then check in on them 15 days later with some helpful links..

And there you have it. This is our tool kit. This is what I use to create all of the things you see me making. From here, now that the tools are in place and all set up, my next post will be to show you how to build a Flow Button that connects to a SharePoint list, where we can keep a bunch of information and also a Power BI Steaming data set, and we will combine all of those items to create a work hours tracking system.

If you want to never miss a blog from me, Import my Blog alert Flow into your own environment, and then ill teach you to build one for yourself in a future blog post!

Thanks for reading!

Peace friends!

 

By Jon Levesque

Father. Explorer. Outdoorsman. Speaker. Builder of Community. #MicrosoftFlow. Photography. Automation. Evangelist. Beer & Wing enthusiast. Opinions are my own.

 

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