When I was working in my last position we ran an Office 365 environment. It had all the features you could ever ask for and very few of the complications one is faced with in a local Exchange environment. Failover was taken care of for us, High Availability didn't involve 6 in house/colocation servers and when an outage did occur I didn't have to wade ankle deep into the shit storm that was an office without email. One slight annoyance, however, was when Gates and Co.  decided to roll out new services. More often than not such new features were like a surprise birthday party. You were absolutely elated to see everyone there, but then you realized they invited Gary the office cynic (the views of this writer do not reflect those of all other staff, many of us love Gary and would be more than happy to invite him to our next party - ed.).  One such example of this was Microsoft's implementation of "OWA for devices"

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When working on transferring our old out of office request system to the new Sharepoint workflow, created by yours truly (He's so modest - ed), I came across a really neat Microsoft Office "feature". This feature will prevent some versions of Office products from opening when certain sharepoint actions are clicked. For me it was the "Open with Access" button found in my Calendar Tools bar. 

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One thing that has been a god send since I started working in the IT field has been the discovery of windows quick keys. These simple button press combinations have sped up my ability to access programs, features and services that in the past would have taken me several seconds of jogging through sub menus. To hopefully help you speed up your work flow here are some of my favorites:

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When starting my new job as a System Administrator in Columbus, OH I came across a highly under utilized Sharepoint 2010 system. Having established a Sharepoint 2013 deployment in my last job, and having just enough knowledge of Sharepoint to make me dangerous, I decided that I would take it upon myself to make some additions which would take advantage of Sharepoint's workflow tasks. The first item on my chopping block was their out of office requests which were, up to this point, being done through Lotus Notes. 

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While working at my last job we began using a new product for our backups and replication called AppAssure. Currently owned by Dell, AppAssure is a utility along the same lines as EMCs Avamar or several other vendors backup products that promise you the world but fall exceedingly short.

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