I’m going to be at Bett 2018 next week with the Cloud Design Box team, really excited to have some stand space this year with our MIS integration partners SalamanderSoft. Cloud Design Box will be showcasing the best of SharePoint, Class Notebook and Teams integration. Our stand number is C210, opposite Google on the main … Read more

Homework has many benefits for students including learning how to work independently, staying organised and taking responsibility for their part in the educational process. It also gives them a chance to review the lesson and go over the material again. Assignments give teachers the ability to track student progress and to see if the student … Read more

PowerApps is a great tool at building complex business applications using logic and no code. Microsoft provide several themes out-of-the-box to give your app a consistent look and feel. There is no option to create a custom theme (please release this functionality Microsoft)! As a workaround, we can use some logic to have a single … Read more

OneNote Class Notebook is free for education users as part of Office 365, it has some additional functionality which isn’t available in standard OneNote files. In this blog post, I want to focus on the additional learning tools available in this version. There is also a video guide for this post below. How do I … Read more

There’s no denying that Office 365 now provides a fantastic integrated suite of products. Why should schools and colleges look at moving to Office 365? Can it save time, money and improve student engagement? Let’s take a look in more detail. Why is cloud storage important? Office Integration One of the big benefits of using … Read more

This web part replicates the classic Promoted Links Web Part but with added features such as web part properties to change the background colour, size of background image and to select which promoted link list to use. You can download it here. For more information on the full Cloud Design Box learning platform for modern … Read more

Have you heard about the virtual Collab365 Global Conference 2017 that’s streaming online November 1st – 2nd? Join me and 120 other speakers from around the world who will be bringing you the very latest content around SharePoint, Office 365, Flow, PowerApps, Azure, OneDrive for Business and of course the increasingly popular Microsoft Teams. The event is produced by … Read more

Note: this is an updated blog post to include reference material and demos from the SUGUK meeting in Leeds on 5th September 2017. I’ve been a SharePoint designer now for over 10 years. By designer, I mean changing the look and feel of SharePoint. Not just adding simple themes, but making SharePoint, “not look like … Read more

September is here and new collaboration tools are being tried for the first time in Office 365. Microsoft Teams now has class sites, watch my full review in my blog post earlier this summer Latest updates include: Options to disable chat Full screen Class Notebooks Fully working Class Notebooks with settings available OneNote Edit in … Read more

I’ve been a SharePoint designer now for over 10 years. By designer, I mean changing the look and feel of SharePoint. Not just adding simple themes, but making SharePoint, “not look like SharePoint”. It’s a common request for companies and schools to have an intranet or communication portal which reflects their brand and identity. Although … Read more

Class teams are now available inside Microsoft Teams. These are created automatically using School Data Sync (SDS) or can be created manually in the Teams interface. Teams is a great collaboration interface that pulls together instant messaging, videos calls, SharePoint, OneNote and assignments into one place. It can also be extended with custom tabs. I’ve … Read more

The 2017 SharePoint virtual summit took place last week. The previous year had seen a brave new bold redesign of SharePoint into a modern experience. This year we had exciting new announcements building on last year’s vision. New OneDrive and SharePoint Sync Client The new version of OneDrive sync client will map out the entire … Read more

Over the last few months, we have received lots of positive feedback about the new Microsoft Classroom Preview product. Today Microsoft announced in the Office 365 message centre that this would be replaced at the end of July 2017 with Microsoft Teams for Education. No need to panic, MS Classroom functionality will still exist but … Read more

I would like to thank everyone who took part in today’s webinar on Microsoft Classroom by Cloud Design Box. In the session, we covered: How to get Microsoft Classroom How to create a new class Using OneNote Class Notebook to enhance teaching and learning Setting assignments Marking and returning student work Using the mobile apps … Read more

Your users may have noticed that the default reply button in Outlook Web Access is “Reply all”. This can result in emails accidentally being sent to the wrong person (as many users assume this is the reply button without reading it). Luckily you can change this default behaviour. Change for an individual user The user … Read more

School Data Sync has now moved to general availability. Currently this allows users to get data into Microsoft Classroom but does have limitations and can create a considerable overhead when providing the import data. I’ve produced a quick video below looking at School Data Sync and what is means for UK schools. Hope you find … Read more

I recently attended a fascinating talk on machine learning by Martin Kearn and an implementation of this in Microsoft Flow by Mark Stokes. Did you know that there are APIs to access machine learning functionality via Microsoft’s Cognitive Services API? Did you also know that you can easily connect to these services in Office 365? … Read more

The new list and library experience is here in SharePoint Online. It is great news for the SharePoint community (better integration with OneDrive, responsive, platform independent). For users with customisations or for companies who are not ready for the change yet, you can delay the new experience from the administration panel. There are certainly things … Read more

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