Perhaps, as part of an overhaul of its marketing strategy, Microsoft recently launched its Microsoft Training Services to help cut training cost for customers. In what looks like a pre-pilot phase rollout, some customers can use a new digital training tool for its staff when attempting to familiarize them with Office 365, Windows 10 or some sort of commingling of the two.
As part of the pre-pilot phase, some 25 customers (meaning mid to large size businesses, not single individuals) are helping in the development of the program by contributing user feedback deemed necessary by both management and staffing bodies.
General feedback in the Microsoft Training Services program includes focus on:
- Landing the business-specific reasons that new tools are beneficial
- Customizing adoption and training content to meet the needs of their environment
- Keeping training content up-to-date
- Measuring the results of their training efforts
- Keeping IT and champions up-to-date on new features
With Microsoft Training Services, the company is attempting to craft flexible toolkits for managers to use and implement new Office 365 and Windows 10 services without accumulating a ton of time-consuming and financial overhead for training.
- Customizable, flexible content – Admins choose to hide or show content based on their environment or build their own custom playlists that are tailored to the unique needs of their organization. End users make their own playlists and share them with coworkers.
- Experiences sized to the customer need – Our service offers training playlist tools to be incorporated within their existing sites or the full Toolkit for Teamwork experience which can provide the end to end out of the box website for customizable adoption & training content.
- Always up-to-date content: Microsoft Training Services content is continually and automatically updated, enabling organizations to provide a library of up-to-date learning content for end users and avoid the hassle of having to make the changes themselves.
Measurement tools – Management gains valuable insights into the training materials users consume and the types of custom playlists they create and share.
The best part about Microsoft’s Training Services pilot is that it comes as a purchase-free addition to the “Azure hosted content store to Web part hosted on the customer’s SharePoint communication site.” Eventually, a similar package will be available via download on the Teamwork SharePoint Online site.
Sometime in late July 2018, more customers will have access to the Microsoft Training Services pilot, and many more can sign up to be added to the pilot program waitlist, here.
