This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
How do you cope with end-user training in the always-changing cloud?
For this very reason, Microsoft has developed a tool. That tool was the topic of this session: “BRK2165 - Transform end user training using Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways” presented by
What is Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways?
Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is a free, on-demand training solution built on a Modern SharePoint site template that installs within your own Office 365 environment. It is easy to customize and able to host your company content while delivering training on Microsoft 365 workloads like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint, and others.
And in this session, we learned how to increase the use of this solution by integrating it into Microsoft Teams.
It is a great, and free, tool to use in user adoption project, and anywhere else where there is a need for up to date end-user training. This is something that Karuana has wanted to do for the last 20 years, and now they are finally doing it.
Embracing training partners
Microsoft is also working together with partners that soon will be able to deliver their content on this platform. Karuana was very clear on this; they are embracing training partners to expand the offer. She also pointed out that you should respect your trainers, it’s a skill and a profession and nothing you do in your spare time.
Training content is streamed on-demand from support.microsoft.com:
Then a huge bug came up on stage and freaked Kaurana out a bit. The bug was chased off the stage, and the session could continue after a few deep breaths.
Take control of your own training as an IT pro
Karuana shared her best advice on how you, as an IT Pro, should take control over your own learning and get hands-on experience. A good way is to get your private Office 365 tenant and start playing around with all the exciting stuff. And you will want to learn Teams and SharePoint together, not individually, #bettertogether is key.
How to get started with Learning Pathways
Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways are provisioned by the Provisioning SharePoint services. For that you need to have an app catalog, if you don’t, it is easy to create one. Make sure you wait at least 2 hours after the app catalog is created before provisioning the Learning Pathways.
A piece of good advice is to install two instances, one as s staging environment and the other one for production. The actual provisioning usually takes about 15 minutes, up to one hour. It will send a confirmation email when done.
URL to the provisioning site: https://aka.ms/M365LPprovisioning
What’s new
Learning Pathways are just out of beta, and with this new version 3, you get a “Get started with the admin success center” that will help IT admins onboard Learning Pathways.
If you have provisioned a previous version of Learning Pathways, the recommendation is to wipe that installation and start fresh. If you don’t want to do that there are update instructions in the readme file found here: https://github.com/pnp/custom-learning-office-365/blob/master/README.md
Integrate Learning Pathways into Teams
There are two ways to integrate Learning Pathways into Teams; you can pin specific pages or playlists in relevant channels. Or you can add it as an app on the left rail. This feature is currently in beta, but you can try it. There is an installation package that you download from GitHub containing a JSON file that you edit to reflect your specific URL’s.
The installation package can be found here: https://aka.ms/M365LPTeamsApp
More detailed instruction of how to add the Learning Pathways as an app in Teams can be found on my blog: https://www.msteamsswe.se/learning-pathway-as-an-app-in-teams/
There is a known issue, the first time you open it in Teams it may not load properly, reload, and you are good to go.
A few things to know:
- Content updates are automatically streamed to your M365LP Template
- Playlist customizations and technology selections are maintained
- Custom playlists can be created from any online content that can be embedded into SharePoint online pages
- Microsoft support an early adopter program for key Partners. Partners will be enabled to add their own value added content sets to the solution in the future.
What’s next
Multi-language support is coming next year together with vertical versions for education, government, and such. And also content updates, of course.
Next steps
- Go to https://aka.ms/M365LP for guidance on how to install and customize the solution
- Add to your tenant through SharePoint Online Provisioning Service - https://aka.ms/M365LPprovisioning
- Follow the guidance and use adoption kit to drive Microsoft 365 learning pathways usage - https://aka.ms/M365LPadopt
I personally have used Learning Pathways in several Teams adoption projects, and I can say that it is absolutely a great tool for all your end-user training.
A recording of this session can be found here: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/83483?source=sessions