Pait Group Blog

5 Fundamentals for Effective Communication

Lately, I have been seeing an increase in what feels like anti-meeting content. While the point may be to highlight other methods of communication rather than scheduling a meeting, we shouldn't dismiss or put a negative connotation on meetings.  I feel we need a reminder of communication fundamentals.    A "checklist" of sorts we can utilize to ensure we are delivering effective and clear messages.  In this process, we can choose the appropriate channel or medium to best communicate with our coworkers and, as a result, hopefully, reduce the feeling of meeting overload. 

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My favorite 5 Features of Microsoft Lists: A List

Microsoft Lists officially dropped in August, and now that we’ve all had some time to play around it’s a good time to create a list of our own: our favorite five (5) features or functions of Microsoft Lists.

To start, what is Lists? Didn’t SharePoint already have lists? Yes it did, but the custom list feature in SharePoint was pretty well restricted to SharePoint. You could create columns and content types and all sorts of views and pretty ways to present data and metadata and datadatadatadata, but the only ways to use that data out of SharePoint was an export, typically Excel. With Microsoft Lists you can take that same data manipulation power and use it in Teams, SharePoint, or as a standalone application. In addition, you can use Power Automate (formerly Flow) to crunch that data even better.

Before we dive in ....   We discussed this  topic in webinar form click here to check out the discussion.

Ok now lets dive in!

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How to Reuse a Planner Plan as a Template

You can now copy a plan to existing Groups or Teams!  Exciting Right!!!!

When showcasing how teams and organizations can use Planner in Microsoft 365, one question that comes up repeatedly is: How can I create a plan template?  Last year, Microsoft released the ability to copy an existing plan to a new Office 365 Group (now called, a Microsoft 365 Group), effectively enabling a reusable plan “template”. However, creating a new Group for each plan is not ideal for most teams and can easily create Group sprawl. 

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