I had an opportunity to work within an adoption team where my responsibilities were to come with the ideas to drive the adoption of the Office 365 services that we were offering to our customer. Creating the adoption content included various stuffs and biggest chunk of work was to create short videos to demonstrate how users can perform their day-to-day activities.
The next challenge was to make these videos presentated in a manner, that makes it look like a training course and keep the end users motivated. The videos had to be clubbed together logical so that the package was targetted to a specific group of people or it was meant to train the users on a specific subject and other different categories. So we had created a sort of different modules containing scenarios, videos and other related digital content, which acted as our playlist. Having involved and worked on this project, I was keeping an eye on custom learning for Office 365 and hence I wanted to explore the opportunities within it and I started exploring it more.
I divided this blog into 2 parts. In the frist part, I talk about the capabilities of as-is version of Custom Learning Solution for Office 365 and in the second part, I describe the customization opportunities.
- Capabilities of Custom Learning Solution for Office 365
- Customization of Custom Learning Solution for Office 365 (COMING SOON)
1. Capabilities of Custom Learning Solution for Office 365
Custom Learning for Office 365 is a customizable, on-demand training solution designed to increase usage and adoption of Office 365 in an organization. Learn more
Some of the capabilities of the Custom Learning Solution for Office 365 are:
- Ready to use as is solution to drive the adoption
- Easy to customize and adopt to business needs with organization branding
- Integrate with in-house training content as well external content (by directly referring the URLs)
- Easy to target the right training course to the right audience based on skills, services and technologies
- Playlists makes it fun to learn
I followed the instruction Custom Learning Setup Options and everything worked fine and super easy. I installed the solution on 2 different site collections within the same tenant using recommended and stand-alone options respectively and both worked good for me and below you find the home page screen shot
It looks pretty cool. It is a standard communication site and default content is automatically provisioned for us. This is a Hero web part and can be changed pretty easily. The home page also has 2 more web parts pre-configured for us, Events and News.
From the top navigation, Office 365 training gives nice overview of different categories and sub-categories.
Below is the list of categories and sub-categories that gets provisioned by default.
| Category | Sub-category |
| Get Started | First Days |
| Get Started | Recommended |
| Products | Outlook |
| Products | OneDrive |
| Products | Word |
| Products | Excel |
| Products | PowerPoint |
| Products | OneNote |
| Products | SharePoint |
| Products | Microsoft Teams |
| Products | Yammer |
| Products | Office 365 |
| Products | Planner |
| Products | Forms |
| Scenarios | Modern Workspace |
| Adoption Tools | Tools |
Clicking on one of the sub-categories navigates to an overview of one or more Playlists. I selected Outlook and below is the overview of all the playlists that I got.
One playlist has one of more Asset. So the playlist acts as a container of the actual training assets with static text, video and/or an URL of other pages (internal/external). One playlist has one or more asset.
When I clicked on the playlist Outlook 2016 Quick Start I got see Add an email account to Outlook as the first asset
On the top we have breadcrumb, which helps to navigate back to the playlist, sub-category or category quickly
As you can see in the above image, apart from the breadcrumb, we also have 3 icons; Search, Link Copy and Play List System menu.
Using the search, you can search for all the assets and playlists.
The link copy button, give you a short-cut link to copy. This is very handful, when you want to associate one asset in multiple playlist.
Wow, clicking on the Play List System menu opens up a pane that contains all the assets within a play list.
You also have Playlist Administration here. The Playlist Administration is visible only to the Administrators
Playlist Administration
Here is the playlist administration page. You can see that all the Categories and Sub-categories are listed on the left side. On the right side, we have all the playlists within each sub-category. From the playlist administrations page, we can add additional categories, sub-categories, playlists and assets.
Selecting one of the playlist shows us the details of the playlist along with the playlist assets
I will soon write a separate article on Customization of Custom Learning Solution for Office 365 and the scenarios where it can be useful.
The as-is Custom Learning Solution for Office 365 has lot of default content pre-provisioned, structured and integrated as playlists which can give organization a jump start in their adoption journey to Office 365
INNANIS 