Healthcare Archives - Microsoft 365 Blog http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/audience/healthcare/ Tue, 28 Jun 2022 17:45:10 +0000 en-CA hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.2 Empower frontline healthcare workers with Microsoft Teams http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2022/03/15/empower-frontline-healthcare-workers-with-microsoft-teams/ Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:00:00 +0000 Healthcare continues to undergo transformation—it’s facing unprecedented challenges, new and complex expectations, and remarkable opportunities for innovation and growth. At the heart of this transformation are frontline healthcare workers—the doctors, nurses, and care team members that work to help keep us safe and healthy.

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Healthcare continues to undergo transformationit’s facing unprecedented challenges, new and complex expectations, and remarkable opportunities for innovation and growth. At the heart of this transformation are frontline healthcare workers—the doctors, nurses, and care team members that work to help keep us safe and healthy. Touching nearly every step of the patient journey and maintaining the foundation of our healthcare system, healthcare workers require the latest tools to stay engaged, connected, and empowered to provide the best possible care. The adoption of technology to support frontline healthcare workers is increasing, and we’ve seen monthly usage of Microsoft Teams grow over 560 percent in this industry between March 2020 and November 2021.  

At Microsoft, we’re committed to supporting the healthcare workforce by designing products that can help improve the lives of those on the frontline, and the patients they serve. To do this, we’re working on products to connect care teams more seamlessly, provide solutions to efficiently manage and motivate care teams, and empower organizations to adapt to a dynamic and rapidly changing healthcare environment. I’m excited to announce a few new products to make their experience easier in Microsoft Teams.

A seamless experience for virtual appointments

This week at the HIMSS healthcare conference, we’re announcing exciting new features in Microsoft Teams for virtual appointments. We’ve seen the adoption of virtual appointments in healthcare skyrocket during the pandemic, and we continue to see outstanding growth. It’s an area that’s here to stay, with use cases that are core to the future of healthcare and many other key industries. Teams provides a simple and convenient experience for patients and providers for telehealth workflows. It builds on the momentum from the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, with new features to:

Schedule on-demand appointments (preview, April 2022)

A mobile phone selecting an on-demand virtual appointment, joining the virtual waiting room, and meeting with a provider.

Patients can request on-demand appointments with their provider. Organizations using on-demand scheduling can see and monitor on-demand appointments in a queue view through the Microsoft Bookings app in Teams. This builds on the waiting room and queueing features for scheduled appointments that are generally available.

Collect key information for virtual appointments with Microsoft Forms (preview)

Tablet showing a new patient appointment email with a link to a registration form, a click through of the submission process, and a view of the scheduled appointment in the provider’s calendar with a link to the completed form.

Gather patient triage information as part of the virtual appointment in Teams through the integration of Microsoft Forms and the Microsoft Bookings app. When enabled, this feature allows healthcare organizations to collect patient responses and review them as part of the visit.

Help ensure patient devices are working correctly for the appointment—generally available

A mobile phone selecting a device test link from an S M S appointment reminder, testing the camera and microphone, and sending results to the care team.

The new device tester can help you reduce no-shows by allowing patients to test their hardware settings before their virtual appointment. This allows the patient and provider to focus on the appointment, and spend less time on technical challenges. It’s now available through the Microsoft Teams EHR connector.

Send SMS appointment reminders (preview, April 2022)

A mobile phone selecting a join link from an S M S appointment reminder, pressing a check in button, and joining the appointment with a provider on screen.

SMS reminders are key to reducing no-shows and making it easier for patients to join their virtual appointments. While this experience is already available to customers using the Microsoft Bookings app through Teams in the United States, we’re excited to announce the expansion to customers in the United Kingdom.  

See analytics from your virtual appointments (preview)

A tablet displaying Microsoft Teams admin center analytics and reports tab with a mouse toggling between a bar and line graph of virtual appointment usage.

Gaining insights into the performance of virtual appointments is critical to understanding key business insights like lobby wait time, impact of SMS notifications, appointment duration, and more. Authorized users can gain insights into these areas in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center for appointments scheduled through Microsoft Bookings and the Microsoft Teams electronic health record (EHR) connector.

Enhance clinical workflow integration

Building on the momentum we are already seeing with customers using the EHR connector for virtual appointments with Epic, we’re announcing the next phase of our first-party EHR connector for virtual appointments.  

Microsoft Teams EHR connector for Cerner—generally available

Laptop screen selecting a virtual appointment join link from within the Cerner electronic health record window, then showing a virtual appointment window with an adult female patient on screen and female provider in bottom right corner.

The new integration with Cerner expands the capabilities of the Microsoft Teams EHR connector, making it easier for clinicians to launch virtual appointments with patients or consult with other providers in Teams directly from their health record system. This is exciting for organizations using Cerner, which can now easily integrate virtual appointments into their existing clinical workflows.

“As a validated code application, Microsoft Teams EHR connector meets Cerner security, operational, functional and UX criteria designed to help improve the user experience for Cerner clients searching for a third-party telehealth solution.”—Jake Engle, Senior Director of Open Platforms, Cerner

The Microsoft Teams EHR connector offers powerful integration capabilities across healthcare. For example:

  • Providers can schedule and launch virtual appointments directly from Cerner PowerChart, effortlessly invite other care team members to virtual appointments, and gain real-time status reports of their visits to help improve patient care.
  • System administrators have access to simplified setup and configuration management directly in the EHR connector portal and can easily access downloadable consumption reports and call quality boards.
  • Patients can test their device before the appointment, launch the appointment from SMS or email (without the need to download the Teams app), and will wait in a custom lobby before they are admitted by the provider.

Customers have already seen great results from the Microsoft Teams EHR connector. For example, Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital has been using it with Epic, saying “the greatest benefit is how we’ve used Teams to lower the threshold to care and make it possible for any patient to consult a physician, no matter their location or circumstance.

Create an advanced virtual health experience

Teladoc Health Solo™ with Microsoft Teams

Tablet displaying the specialty clinic assessment tab of the Teladoc Health Solo T M program with Microsoft Teams including patient’s name, injury assessment notes, medical plan details, and on-file imaging and documents.

In collaboration with Teladoc Health, a global leader in virtual healthcare, we are announcing the general availability of Teladoc Health Solo™ with Microsoft Teams. This new offering transforms the virtual care experience by enhancing clinical collaboration, improving the user experience, increasing system efficiency, and expanding care delivery—making it easier for care teams to collaborate and manage their patients and resources, at scale.

Teladoc Health Solo™ with Teams simplifies the way healthcare organizations and care providers work by streamlining technologies and administrative processes, so clinicians can focus on what matters most—delivering high-quality patient care.

Empower your healthcare workers on the frontline


Epic is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corporation

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From Microsoft Teams to Fluid Framework—here’s what’s new and coming soon to Microsoft 365 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2020/05/19/microsoft-teams-fluid-framework-new-microsoft-365/ Tue, 19 May 2020 15:00:21 +0000 It’s opening day for Build, and the first time we’re holding our annual developer conference entirely online. In this era of remote everything, technology is enabling us to keep providing experiences like Build even though we can’t meet in person. As CEO Satya Nadella put it recently, “We’ve seen two years’ of digital transformation in

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It’s opening day for Build, and the first time we’re holding our annual developer conference entirely online. In this era of remote everything, technology is enabling us to keep providing experiences like Build even though we can’t meet in person. As CEO Satya Nadella put it recently, “We’ve seen two years’ of digital transformation in two months.” And as a company, we are so excited to translate what we’ve learned into new features and enhancements that help our customers stay productive and connected. At a moment when we’re all adapting to an evolving reality, these experiences are designed to enable you to keep work moving, no matter what.

A note to developers before we begin: Whether building your own apps or solutions that are designed to be used in Microsoft Teams or Outlook, we have a whole host of new innovations for you. At Build this week, we’re announcing many new capabilities that you can use to make your apps more integrated, powerful, and intuitive. We’re also introducing new developer and management tools that make creating and discoverability even easier. Find out more about all of the new opportunities for developers using the Microsoft 365 platform announced at Build. Let’s get to it!

News from Build 2020

Today we announced new features and capabilities in Microsoft Teams, Fluid Framework, Project Cortex, Outlook and Edge and introduced the new Microsoft Lists app. They represent the latest innovations in our ongoing effort to build tools that enable our customers to stay connected and productive from everywhere.

Microsoft Teams

Teams is the hub for teamwork combining meetings, calls, chat, and collaboration into a single tool that preserves context and keeps everyone up to speed.

Productivity

From customized templates to new tasking capabilities, we’re introducing fresh ways to stay productive in Teams.

Create teams quickly with customizable templates—When creating a new team, you’ll soon be able to pick from a variety of customizable templates. Choose from common business scenarios, like event management and crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates, like a hospital ward or bank branch. Each template comes with pre-defined channels, apps, and guidance. Admins will also be able to create new custom templates and templatize existing teams in their organization, allowing them to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices. Templates in Teams will roll out in the next few months and appear automatically.

Automation

We’re excited to announce enhancements to the Power Platform that make it easier to integrate and scale with Teams.

Easily create and manage chatbots in Teams—Integrating with Teams is also easier than ever: Just select the bot you want to use and then click Add to Teams. For additional convenience, Power Virtual Agents now supports single sign-on (SSO), so users will no longer have to reauthenticate when using Teams for the first time.

Blog Chat Window

Quickly add custom apps and automated workflows to Teams—Developers and admins will soon be able to add their custom applications from Power Apps to Teams with a single click of the Add to Teams button. To get started, open make.powerapps.com, click ““ next to the canvas app you’d like to publish, and select Add to Teams.

Quickly add custom apps and automated workflows to Teams

Meanwhile, new Power Automate business process templates for Teams will allow creators to streamline workflows using pre-built templates, or as a base to customize their own. Finally, new Teams-specific triggers and actions will enable you to create custom message extensions, automate @mentioning and message posting to channels, and customize bot names. These features are coming soon.

Share Power BI reports in Teams—Power BI users can now share reports, or specific charts in reports, to Teams with the new Share to Teams button. Senders can also direct the recipient’s attention to a specific chart in a report or share to an entire team. To get started, select Send to Teams from the Power BI portal and type in the team name you’d like to share with.

Share Power BI reports in Teams

Meetings and events

Across time zones and social-distancing scenarios, organizations need to connect and collaborate in gatherings large and small. New Teams capabilities help you design the best experience for every occasion.

Schedule virtual appointments via Bookings in Teams—Organizations will now be able to schedule, manage, and conduct business-to-consumer virtual appointments through the new Bookings app integration in Microsoft Teams. With a single scheduling experience, you can manage multiple departments or locations and securely host everything from candidate interviews and student office hours to financial consultations and medical visits. Teams support HIPAA compliance and is HITRUST certified. In healthcare alone, there were more than 34 million Teams meetings in the past month, including virtual visits. Today, you can learn how Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will make it easier for healthcare organizations to remain agile and focus on what they do best – delivering better experiences, insights, and care.

Broadcast events and create studio productions from a virtual stage in Teams—With so many organizations working remotely, and travel at a record low, how do you recreate the magic of an in-person presentation or interview for an all-remote audience? Introducing new Network Device Interface (NDI) support and Skype TX interoperability for Teams. It offers a more advanced set of production options for both public and private, customized, high-scale broadcasts.

Coming soon, NDI for Microsoft Teams will transform a Teams meeting into a virtual stage by converting each participant’s video into a discrete video source that can be used in the production tool of your choice: OBS, Wirecast, Xsplit, StreamLabs, and many more. This functionality enables you to use Teams meetings in other ways, including hosting a professional broadcast.

Secure and remote scheduling

Shifts lets Firstline Workers and their managers use mobile devices to manage schedules and keep in touch.

Extend the Shifts app in Teams—New capabilities in the Shifts app extends functionality and enables integration with existing systems. First, the Graph APIs for Shifts are now generally available, so can you integrate them with any other external workforce management tool, including custom workforce management systems. Plus, new Power Automate actions enable developers to take information from Shifts and create customized workflows with other apps or perform operations at scale. Finally, new triggers and templates will help support a variety of timesaving and process-optimization scenarios, like enabling auto-approvals for shift requests in scenarios where a manager’s approval is not needed.

Fluid Framework

At Ignite 2019, we announced the public preview of Microsoft Fluid Framework, our new technology and set of experiences designed to make collaboration seamless by breaking down barriers between apps.

Collaborate with Fluid components and workspaces in Outlook and Office.com—The Fluid Framework is on a journey to make work more adaptable and focused. The first Fluid Framework integrations in Microsoft 365, coming to Outlook and Office.com, will enable you to collaborate on dynamic content and create connected components that can be shared simultaneously and seamlessly across apps. Tables, charts, and task lists can be easily inserted in Outlook for the web, so your sales numbers, project tasks, and research reports are always up to date. Within Office.com, Fluid workspaces can be created and managed, including within your document activity feed, Recommended list, and @mentions—or search for them across Office.com. And, because Fluid Framework components are lightweight, edits are instantaneous, empowering work to be fast and flexible. These experiences will be available to those with a Microsoft 365 enterprise license in the next few months.

Use key infrastructure from Fluid Framework—now open source—in your applications—The web-based framework of Fluid can be used to instantly make your apps collaborative. It includes data structures that perform low-latency synchronization and a relay service to connect endpoints. If you replace your static data structures with Fluid data structures, your app instantly supports real-time collaboration.

Discovering the full potential of the Fluid Framework can only be accomplished through creating a diverse, open, and vibrant developer community. For this reason, Microsoft will be making the Fluid Framework open source, allowing developers and creators to use key infrastructure from Fluid Framework in their own applications. Along with the release of additional developer documentation and tooling, this is an invitation for developers to work alongside Microsoft as Fluid Framework is built and released.

Project Cortex

We introduced Project Cortex at Ignite 2019 and are happy to announce it will be generally available in early summer 2020. This powerful new service applies artificial intelligence (AI) and the Microsoft Graph to create a knowledge network that connects your content in Microsoft 365, along with external sources, to organize content and expertise across systems and teams. You can then manage your information and streamline processes with advanced security and compliance controls, along with automated workflows.

Project Cortex

Work with new developer tools now in private preview—Today, we are introducing new developer APIs for Project Cortex and Managed Metadata Services (MMS) in Microsoft Graph, along with new integration with Language Understanding services in Azure. Currently, our private preview program has expanded to include more than 75 organizations delivering knowledge from millions of documents and videos, including Unilever, Arla Foods, and Siemens Healthineers. We will keep you all informed as new milestones are achieved.

Outlook

Around the world, our customers rely on Outlook to help organize their days and stay in touch. New capabilities let them do more within the app to be more productive.

Save keystrokes in Outlook—Now, Outlook on the web can help compose email messages with text predictions. Using intelligent technology to infer meaning and intention, Outlook can help you compose faster, avoid typos, and craft polished email messages.

Keep up with Yammer in Outlook—Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook mobile users can now view and reply to Yammer conversations, polls, questions, and praise without leaving their inbox. This feature will automatically become available for users who have email notifications from Yammer turned on.

Microsoft Edge

This year at Build, we’re announcing several new capabilities in Microsoft Edge that add customization options and improved tooling for web developers.

Quickly explore relevant Pinterest collections—Pinterest can now deliver suggestions at the bottom of your collection, making it easier to find additional similar content. Clicking on a suggestion will open a board of similar, trending Pins so you can quickly find and add ideas relevant to you. Collections will also soon support “Send to OneNote,” making it easy to export collections to OneNote pages.

Save time while searching—We’re also introducing sidebar search so you can search for things without opening a new window or tab. And for those who use Microsoft Edge for both work and personal use, we’re excited to introduce Automatic Profile Switching, which will detect that the link you’re trying to open needs work credentials, and then switch you to your authenticated work profile.

Check out expanded developer options during preview—Because we love developers, we’re expanding the preview with new options for .NET and UWP (WinUI 3.0) development, enabling you to embed a Chromium-based Edge WebView in WinForms, WPF, and UWP/Win UI 3.0 applications. We’ve also added a 3D View in DevTools. Check out our documentation and Getting Started guide, or simply open Visual Studio and download the WebView2 package to get started.

Microsoft Lists

Microsoft Lists is your smart information tracking app across Microsoft 365. With Lists, you can easily track data and information to stay updated on the latest status.

Track information with Microsoft Lists—Now, you can create, share, and track data and information—like issue tracking and status reporting—directly within Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and the soon-to-be-released Lists mobile app. Lists are easy for anyone to create and customize with templates, color coding, If/Then workflows, and more. Learn more about Microsoft Lists.

Track content across apps with Microsoft Lists

At a time of unprecedented change, we are all rapidly adjusting to a new era of work. From software developers to healthcare workers, government first responders to multinational c-suites, everyone is finding new ways to stay productive and connected, whether they are working together or apart. The features and enhancements we announced today are all designed to support the incredible achievements of our customers around the world. We are committed to continuing to build the tools that keep the world’s work moving, through this crisis and beyond.

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Microsoft Teams at 3: Everything you need to connect with your teammates and be more productive http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2020/03/19/microsoft-teams-3-everything-you-need-connect-teammates-be-more-productive/ Thu, 19 Mar 2020 13:00:47 +0000 This week marks the third anniversary of Microsoft Teams. It’s been an incredible three years, and I’m inspired to see the way organizations across the globe are using Teams to transform the way they work. Today, I’m going to share some new Teams capabilities across a few different aspects of the Teams experience, many with

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This week marks the third anniversary of Microsoft Teams. It’s been an incredible three years, and I’m inspired to see the way organizations across the globe are using Teams to transform the way they work. Today, I’m going to share some new Teams capabilities across a few different aspects of the Teams experience, many with a tie to meetings.

But first I want to talk to you about the moment we all find ourselves in. And I want to recognize the organizations, employees, and students across the globe who have been thrown into remote work and remote learning in an effort to keep themselves and the people around them healthy and safe.

Adjusting to remote work and learning

Around the world, millions of people have been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. It has affected how we work, how we socialize, our family life, and our community life. Here in the Puget Sound, we’ve asked about 50,000 Microsoft employees not to commute to work, and they are joined by tens of thousands of Microsoft employees worldwide who are now working remotely. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes it’s been downright disorienting. But our team is still connecting. Still collaborating. Still getting our work done.

In the face of COVID-19, there are countless stories from customers who are using Teams to connect and thrive in inspiring ways. A professor at University of Bologna in Italy shared on Twitter how the school moved 90 percent of courses online to Teams within four days, which is definitely a first in the university’s 900-plus year history. Doctors at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Pennsylvania will use Teams for videoconferencing with patients, especially those who are most vulnerable to coronavirus, as a way to protect both patients and healthcare providers. And the City of Osaka in Japan is using Teams to conduct orientations and trainings for hundreds of new incoming employees in April.

Stories like these are playing out in countries the world over. We believe that this sudden, globe-spanning move to remote work will be a turning point in how we work and learn. Already, we are seeing how solutions that enable remote work and learning across chat, video, and file collaboration have become central to the way we work. We have seen an unprecedented spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users,* a figure that has grown by 12 million in just the last seven days. And those users have generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams each day this week.

It’s very clear that enabling remote work is more important than ever, and that it will continue to have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak. We are committed to building the tools that help organizations, teams, and individuals stay productive and connected even when they need to work apart.

Transforming the way people work

Over the last three years, thousands of organizations, small and large—including 93 of the Fortune 100—have discovered how Teams can be their hub for teamwork, helping them to stay connected and engaged. Industry leading organizations are rolling out Teams enterprise-wide. In fact, 20 customers have more than 100,000 employees actively using Teams, including Ernst & Young, SAP, Pfizer, and Continental AG, as well as Accenture, which has 440,000 employees actively using Teams.

Image showing 93 organizations using Teams, 650+ organizations have more than 10K users, in 181 markets, and 53 languages.

What’s new in Teams

We continue to invest in experiences that will make it easier for teams to communicate and collaborate. The new capabilities we are announcing today reflect our commitment to two things: building the very best online meeting experience for our customers; and bringing technological solutions to traditionally underserved professionals, including Firstline and healthcare workers.

  • We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression helps to minimize distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.
  • In large meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for remote participants to chime in when they have something to say. The raise hand feature lets anyone in the meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say.

Animated image showing the raise hand feature in Microsoft Teams.

  • Industrial workers need to communicate and collaborate effectively while staying safe. Through a new integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, Firstline Workers will be able to access information and communicate hands-free with remote experts from their job site.

Image of a RealWear helmet.

  • Conducting B2C virtual appointments is a common requirement for situations like healthcare patient visits, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Announced earlier this month, the Bookings app in Teams makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual appointments.
  • Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and move more easily between ongoing conversations.
  • Offline and low-bandwidth support lets you read chat messages and write responses, even without an internet connection, making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.
  • We are also expanding the Teams devices ecosystem, with new devices certified for Teams. The Yealink VC210, now generally available, is the first collaboration bar certified for Teams, and brings together speakers, microphones, a camera, and a native Teams experience to deliver a meeting experience for smaller conference rooms that is simple to install and easy to manage. In addition, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphone 700 UC is available for purchase in late spring.
  • We’re pleased to introduce Microsoft 365 Business Voice in the U.S., a new offering for small-and mid-sized businesses that makes Teams a complete phone system, as well as a new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan lineup that will include additional licensing options for Firstline Workers.

Unless otherwise stated above, the new capabilities will be available later this year.

Since we launched Teams three years ago, it has evolved to become the hub for teamwork—a place where you can meet, chat, call, and collaborate all in one place. We will continue to improve and expand experiences for all workers to be as productive and connected as possible. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to push people everywhere into remote work and learning, enabling remote work and remote learning has never felt more important, and we are grateful for the opportunity to stand by our customers at such an extraordinary time.

*We define daily active usage as the maximum daily users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period across the desktop client, mobile client, and web client. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. Passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app are not included.

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5 steps for boosting your digital transformation with Microsoft 365 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2020/02/18/5-steps-boost-digital-transformation-microsoft-365/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:00:25 +0000 Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many companies whose IT teams are focused on a path of “digital transformation.” The one thing I hear over and over is the challenges they have in getting users to adopt new software even though it will help them to be more productive

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Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many companies whose IT teams are focused on a path of “digital transformation.” The one thing I hear over and over is the challenges they have in getting users to adopt new software even though it will help them to be more productive in the long term.

This month, I’d like to share with you some great tools and resources that you can leverage to help drive adoption with your users. These tools provide users with the resources they need to build the skillsets needed to be successful while providing you with the insights you need to track adoption.

Microsoft 365

Best-in-class productivity apps with intelligent cloud services that transform the way you work.

Get started

So how can we help bring your vision of the world’s productivity cloud—Microsoft 365—to life?

Step 1: Get industry-specific guidelines with the Productivity Library

Start with understanding how Microsoft 365 can improve productivity in your specific role or industry using scenarios and best practices with the Productivity Library. The Productivity Library is available for a wide range of industries including financial services, retail, and healthcare and gets granular for roles like operations, sales, and human resources.

Step 2: Develop a plan with the Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide

The Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide helps you to not just identify and prioritize key scenarios, but also helps you understand how to best build and launch your adoption plan with your stakeholders. The Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide will help you drive business value by showing you how to monitor and track adoption and usage.

Step 3: Create your advocates and champions

When you’re ready to start training your users, we recommend leveraging the power of the Office 365 Champions program. This program is designed to help you create a circle of influence for those early adopters or go-to people in your organization and empower them to become your Office 365 Champions. This program provides support and resources to help these users find more efficient way to tackle everyday tasks and then share those learnings with their peers.

Step 4: Build your own learning portal

Did you know you can build a custom training portal with just a few clicks? Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is a customizable, on-demand learning solution designed to increase usage and adoption of Microsoft 365 services in your organization. This includes on-demand custom training, SharePoint Online portal provisioning, and straightforward steps to provision, customize, and share your new portal with users.

Step 5: Track users progress

Once you implement some of these learning resources you’ll need some tools to help you to track your software adoption progress. The new Microsoft Productivity Score—currently in private preview—will provide you with visibility into how your organization works, insights that identify where you can enable improved experiences so people can reach their goals, and actions to update skills and systems so everyone can do their best work.

For companies who want to help their employees better understand how they spend their time and guide them to better work habits and team norms, we encourage you to turn on MyAnalytics. This tool helps users improve their focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration.

MyAnalytics is available to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Enterprise and Business suite users.

Finally, for a top-down view, we offer Workplace Analytics. Workplace Analytics provides more advanced tools to discover and analyze the business impact of the way people work and help drive change through MyAnalytics. It gives you a view into collaboration patterns that empowers organizations to act with agility, improve employee experience, and sharpen customer focus.

Workplace Analytics is available as a Microsoft 365 add-on service.

Check out the Microsoft 365 Knowledge podcast

To help you better understand why Microsoft 365 is the world’s productivity cloud, I encourage you to check out the Microsoft 365 Knowledge podcast. Hosted by veteran IT blogger Paul Thurrott and myself, this podcast series digs into the features and functionality across the products that make up Microsoft 365. We also share real-world tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the product. The first two episodes are available on demand.

Every company’s path to digital transformation is different. Over the next few months we’ll bring you more resources, as well as interviews with organizations who share their tips and secrets on their own successful transformations and their learnings from these projects on how they harnessed the transformative power of Microsoft 365—the world’s productivity cloud.

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5 attributes of successful teams http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2019/11/19/5-attributes-successful-teams/ Tue, 19 Nov 2019 14:00:52 +0000 The way we work has changed. Today, winning in business requires constant innovation, and this innovation in turn requires collaboration across disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Prior to this seismic shift in the workplace, the atomic unit of productivity was the individual. Now it’s the team. A high-performing team brings together talented individuals and operates as

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The way we work has changed. Today, winning in business requires constant innovation, and this innovation in turn requires collaboration across disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Prior to this seismic shift in the workplace, the atomic unit of productivity was the individual. Now it’s the team. A high-performing team brings together talented individuals and operates as more than the sum of its parts. It draws on the strengths of each member and compensates for individual limitations. But in an increasingly distributed and fast-paced world, even the perfect team chemistry isn’t enough. Today’s teams also need collaboration tools that help them put that chemistry to work. They need technology that can reach across space and time and help team members feel like they’re just a few feet away, even when they’re worlds apart.

At Microsoft, we’re on a mission to help every team become a successful team. And so, we partnered with IDEO, a global design company known for its human-centered, interdisciplinary approach. Together, we researched successful workplace teams to find out what they had in common. Then we used what we learned to create The Art of Teamwork—a new digital curriculum built around the five attributes of a successful team.

And that’s not all. We’re also using the findings from the research to refine Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. What’s clear from the data is that the future of workplace collaboration won’t be defined by any one technology. Instead, successful teams need collaboration tools that combine a wide range of technologies in new and innovative ways. Teams brings together chat, meetings, calling, document collaboration, and workflow into a single app—and this unique combination is catching fire.

In fact, today Teams has more than 20 million daily active users. What’s more, while these users start with simple text-based chat, they quickly move on to richer forms of communication and collaboration. For instance, last month Teams customers participated in more than 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in Teams.

The five attributes

Partnering with IDEO, we researched diverse workplace teams—including astronauts, chefs, television producers, and nurses—to understand what high-performing collaborators have in common. With a variety of workplace teams as our subjects, we used in-context observation, expert interviews, secondary research, and prototype activities to identify the specific dynamics that high-performing teams had in common. We found that successful teams shared five attributes:

  1. Team purpose—Keeps teams focused, fulfilled, and aligned on achieving their objectives.
  2. Collective identity—Fosters a sense of belonging and helps team members work together as a unit.
  3. Awareness and inclusion—Enables teams to navigate interpersonal dynamics and value everyone’s perspective.
  4. Trust and vulnerability—Encourages interpersonal risk-taking in teams.
  5. Constructive tension—Serves as a generative force for new ideas, driving better outcomes.

To learn more about the framework, check out the video below:

Teams customer success stories

With Teams, our customers are breaking through the artificial boundaries created by standalone or loosely coupled collaboration tools and working together in new ways. Their stories bring the five attributes of successful teams to life and paint a picture of what is possible.

Bold beauty: L’Oreal

At L’Oreal, the global beauty company, Chief Technology and Operations Officer, Barbara Lavernos explains, “Our momentum is driven by people interacting, putting ideas on the table, and jumping on them through spontaneous discussion. The new technology that allows for personality, contributions, and real innovation is Microsoft Teams.” With Teams, L’Oreal employees have a space to be creative while moving at the speed and scale needed to deliver over 7 billion products to customers annually.

From the factory floor to the C-Suite: Alcoa

Firstline Workers at Alcoa, a global leader in bauxite, alumina, and aluminum production, have embraced Teams to access business information on their own mobile devices while working at their remote Iceland facility. Before using Teams, when managers needed someone to come in for a shift, they had to call them, often late at night. Now with Teams, managers schedule plant employees using Shifts, which they can access on their mobile devices. With Shifts, the problem of workers missing scheduled assignments has resolved, with the absentee rate falling to nearly zero. “Shifts in Teams is much more efficient for organizing people,” says Friopjófur Tómasson, a plant supervisor. “If I had to use one word to tell you what Teams means to me, it’s ‘efficiency.’ Shifts saves me at least an hour a day.”

Simplified collaboration: Telefónica

At telecommunications company Telefonica, employees conduct business-building projects in Teams. An offsite meeting of executives can now be coordinated in a highly secure, centralized hub. This simple meeting used to be a coordination nightmare, with up to 20 colleagues from several departments focusing on various workstreams. “Before Teams, we had to integrate different aspects of a project that had been created in isolation from each other. Now, a group of colleagues can build on the documents in a collaborative way and edit the project directly. This process used to take four weeks, now we can accomplish it in a matter of days,” says Jamie Rodriguez-Ramos Fernandez, Director of Strategic Analysis at Telefónica.

Putting patient care first: St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN)

St. Luke’s University Health Network providers are replacing different third-party collaboration apps with Teams, simplifying their lives with a single workspace for anytime, anywhere conversations about patients. “Even as we look to secure text messaging as one of the advantages of the ubiquitous cellphone, we still have to comply with HIPAA and other privacy requirements,” says Dr. James Balshi, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Vascular Surgeon at SLUHN. “But we don’t have to worry about that with Teams. It’s equally functional on the smartphone, tablet, and desktop computer. I use the camera technology on the phone to share patient information in a more secure and HIPAA-compliant manner with colleagues during a Teams video call. I’ve also shared EMR notes and X-ray images.”

Connecting across the globe: Trek

Trek is a leading bicycle designer, manufacturer, and retailer that is adapting quickly to a fast-changing environment. Some U.S.-based employees work in locations other than the company’s Waterloo, Wisconsin, headquarters, including at other facilities, home, or retail locations. Trek’s international business has also grown quickly with the company expanding its operations to 17 established offices around the world. “Having good connectivity and digital meeting experiences is critical in making the way we work a success,” says Nathan Pieper, IT Business Applications and Collaboration Manager at Trek. The meetings capabilities in Teams “was the carrot that got people in,” says Pieper. “Teams adoption grew because people used it, told other people to use it, and invited them to online meetings on it.”

A high-performing team can do what otherwise would be impossible. And with Teams, there’s no limit to what you and your team can achieve at work. To improve teamwork in your organization, check out the digital teamwork guide at the Art of Teamwork home page. And if you’re not using Teams yet, get started today!

Note: Customers are ultimately responsible for their own HIPAA compliance.

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Microsoft Teams wins Enterprise Connect Best in Show award and delivers new experiences for the intelligent workplace http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2019/03/19/microsoft-teams-experiences-intelligent-workplace/ Tue, 19 Mar 2019 14:00:32 +0000 Today, at the Enterprise Connect event in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft Teams won the Best in Show award for the second year in a row in recognition for its vision for making communication and collaboration easier for the entire workforce, including those on the frontline. This week marks the second anniversary of the worldwide launch of

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Today, at the Enterprise Connect event in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft Teams won the Best in Show award for the second year in a row in recognition for its vision for making communication and collaboration easier for the entire workforce, including those on the frontline. This week marks the second anniversary of the worldwide launch of Microsoft Teams. Over the past two years, Teams has grown significantly in both new capabilities and customer usage, as the hub for teamwork that brings people together and fosters a culture of engagement and inclusion. We’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure. Watch Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect live Tuesday March 19, 2019 at 10 AM ET or on-demand.

More than 500,000 organizations, including 91 of the Fortune 100, use Teams to collaborate across locations, time zones, and languages, including Cerner, Cox Automotive, dm-drogerie markt, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Hendrick Motorsports, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, Mitsui & Co., National Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Razer, Ricoh, and Trek Bicycle. Teams is currently available in 44 languages across 181 markets, and soon we’ll roll out support for nine additional languages, including Hindi, Filipino, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Infographic showing Microsoft Teams celebrating two years of continued growth.

Teams makes collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure

Microsoft Teams is improving workplace collaboration by helping organizations move from an array of disparate apps to a single, secure hub that brings together what teams need, including chat, meetings, and calling, all with native integration to the Office 365 apps. Users can customize and extend their experience with third-party apps, processes, and devices, giving them the tools they need to get work done.

Following the customizable mobile Teams experience announced in January, today we’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make meetings more inclusive and effective while delivering new levels of security and compliance.

  1. Customized backgrounds takes our intelligent background blur technology further, allowing participants to select a custom background, such as a company logo or an office environment when working from home, to appear behind them during a meeting or video call. This improves the effectiveness of remote meetings by encouraging the use of video while minimizing distractions. Coming later this year.

  1. Content cameras and Intelligent Capture in Microsoft Teams Rooms will soon support an additional camera for capturing content, such as information on analog whiteboards. Using any USB camera, Microsoft Teams Rooms leverages Microsoft’s new Intelligent Capture processing to capture, focus, resize, and enhance whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see whiteboard brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard. Coming later this year.

Animated image showing Intelligent Capture utilized in Teams.

  1. Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to work together directly in Teams. With upcoming support for Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams Rooms, in-person attendees can also contribute. You can even add content from a physical whiteboard onto the Whiteboard canvas without having to recreate it from scratch. Whether you choose to participate from the meeting room or remotely, Whiteboard in Teams enables everyone to actively participate in the conversation. Now in public preview.
  2. Live captions & subtitles make your Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location. Improve meeting effectiveness by allowing attendees to read speaker captions in real-time, so they can more easily stay in sync and contribute to the discussion. English preview coming soon.

Image showing live captions and subtitles utilized in Teams.

  1. Secure private channels allow you to customize which members of the team can see conversations and files associated with a channel. You can restrict channel participation and exposure when needed without having to create separate teams to limit visibility. This is one of our top requested features and we’re excited to be actively testing this internally and with select customers. Coming later this year.
  2. Information barriers avoid conflicts of interest within your organization by limiting which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other in Microsoft Teams. This helps limit the disclosure of information by controlling communication between the holders of information and colleagues representing different interests, for example, in Firstline Worker scenarios. This is particularly helpful for organizations that need to adhere to Ethical Wall requirements and other related industry standards and regulations. Coming soon.
  3. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations enables customers to detect, automatically protect, and screen for sensitive information in chats and channel conversations. By creating DLP policies, admins can help prevent sensitive information from unintentionally being shared or leaked—either inside or outside of the organization. Now generally available in all Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans that include Office 365 Advanced Compliance.
  4. Live events in Microsoft 365 enables anyone to create live and on-demand events that deliver compelling communications to employees, customers, and partners. Live events use video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream, or Yammer and can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. Up to 10,000 attendees can participate in real-time from anywhere, across their devices, or catch up later with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) features—such as automatic transcription—to unlock the content of the event recording. Now generally available.

To learn more about these announcements and more, read our detailed blog on the Teams Tech Community.

Hear it from our customers

All around the world, in businesses of every size and industry, people are using Teams as their hub for teamwork. With the help of Teams, airline crews stay connected, marketing agencies prepare pitches, teachers give all students a voice, financial analysts beat deadlines, patients receive better care, and employers find the right talent. We are thankful to all our customers, partners, and those of you who have become avid Teams users for coming on this journey with us.

The Hendrick Motorsports logo.

NASCAR racing team Hendrick Motorsports gains competitive edge

Legendary race team Hendrick Motorsports chose Teams as the hub for its race communications and decision-making. While the cars speed along the racetrack, race engineers, mechanical experts, and strategists take their positions in the Team Operations Center in Concord, North Carolina—hundreds of miles away. They gather and analyze massive amounts of data and communicate in real-time with the team at the track. “Quick, clear, effective communication is of the utmost importance in racing,” says race engineer Zac Brown. Zac relies on Teams to stay in constant contact with his driver, his crew chief, and pit crew at the track. He uses Teams to share large files and says that because Teams is integrated with the full Office 365 suite, it saves critical seconds otherwise lost in toggling between apps.

The Razer logo.

Razer wins in the gaming industry with constant, clear communication

Razer dominates the fast-moving gaming lifestyle industry where speed of execution and quality keeps them ahead. Managing dual headquarters in San Francisco and Singapore and an international team spread across the globe, Razer requires the best tools for rapid communication, fast decision-making, and real-time collaboration. They chose Teams to meet this need and gain a competitive advantage in this highly competitive industry. “We use Teams for the rapid-fire burst of communications we need to be super productive, and we’ve really changed the workplace culture, accelerating efficient communications to speed time-to-market—from innovation to manufacturing to marketing,” says Patricia Liu, chief of staff at Razer.

Read more about how Razer users Teams to accelerate collaborative product development.

The Cerner logo.

Cerner’s empowered workforce adopts Teams with enthusiasm

Cerner is one of the world’s largest providers of health information technology solutions and services. Cerner’s associates work across the world in different shifts, different time zones, and different languages. Communication and content creation historically happened using disparate tools, making it difficult for employees to work together effectively. Now, Teams allows them to connect and collaborate intuitively. “You know a solution resonates with a workforce when it is adopted without any prompting from IT. This is the case with Teams,” says Bill Graff, CIO at Cerner. “In just a few months, our associates formed more than two thousand teams across the organization—and it all happened organically.”

Read more about how Cerner is consolidating communications in one modern experience with Teams.

The Konica Minolta logo.

Konica Minolta accelerates communication and collaboration

Konica Minolta is renowned for pioneering flexible work arrangements. It empowers employees to telework and do their best creative work from anywhere. Konica Minolta decided to embrace a new form of communication centered on chat, to make communication easier and speedier. With Teams, information workers have all their day-to-day tools in one place. Go Kawakami, IT infrastructure manager, says, “We manage tasks with Planner, report the status of projects with OneNote and Excel, and use SharePoint calendars as bulletin boards. With Teams, we can do this seamlessly.” The ability to invite people outside the company to a Teams channel has streamlined cooperation with partner companies. The company has seen many tangible efficiency improvements, from the PR division to the IT Help Desk.

Read more about how Konica Minolta is enabling remote working from anywhere with Teams.

These are just a few examples of how Teams is delivering an intelligent workplace for everyone—whether you’re a team at headquarters, a remote employee working from home, or a Firstline Worker serving customers each day. If you’re not using Teams yet, be sure to try it now.

To see what’s next in our vision for Teams, watch Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect live Tuesday March 19, 2019 at 10 AM ET or on-demand.

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New capabilities in Microsoft 365 empower healthcare professionals http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2019/02/07/new-capabilities-in-microsoft-365-empower-healthcare-professionals/ Thu, 07 Feb 2019 13:00:49 +0000 Medical care has shifted to team-based care, increased medical specialization, a growing volume of digital patient data, and stringent regulations for patient privacy. Healthcare providers strive to deliver the best possible care to patients, but the tools they use for coordinating patient care are often fragmented and impede the collaborative workflows required in a complex

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Medical care has shifted to team-based care, increased medical specialization, a growing volume of digital patient data, and stringent regulations for patient privacy. Healthcare providers strive to deliver the best possible care to patients, but the tools they use for coordinating patient care are often fragmented and impede the collaborative workflows required in a complex care environment.

To address these challenges, today we are announcing new capabilities in Microsoft Teams that empower care teams and enable healthcare organizations to securely collaborate and communicate. Built on the secure, compliant Microsoft 365 cloud, Teams gives all healthcare workers a familiar way to communicate in real-time, coordinate patient care, and improve operational efficiencies.

New advanced messaging features include priority notifications for urgent messages and message delegation to securely manage urgent patient care. In addition, new platform enhancements provide the ability to integrate electronic health records for care coordination and make Teams an even more powerful hub for health team collaboration.

New messaging features allow care teams to securely coordinate patient care

Good patient care begins with a clinician who is empowered with unfettered access to the right information, the ability to communicate swiftly, and the peace of mind that all of this communication is secure and compliant with patient data protection regulations. This balance of convenience and compliance has been difficult for care teams to achieve. As a result, many clinicians have resorted to using consumer chat apps as part of their patient care. This can pose significant risks to security, compliance, and patient data privacy. And in a highly regulated industry, this can also result in heavy fines for inappropriate data governance and protection.

To help address these unmet needs, we are expanding Teams to enable additional secure communication and collaboration workflows. Building on the customizable mobile Teams experience announced last month, today we’re introducing new advanced messaging features. Priority notifications (now in private preview) alerts a recipient to an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. Message delegation (coming soon), enables a recipient to delegate messages to another recipient when they’re in surgery or otherwise unavailable.

Image of three phones showing a clinician getting a message in Teams.

Clinicians get repeated notices about critical information that needs to be treated differently than other messages.

With message delegation, clinicians and staff can assign another recipient to receive their messages when they’re not available.

These new capabilities come on the heels of new features, such as shifts, a smart camera with image annotation and secure sharing, so images stay in Teams and are not auto-stored to the care providers’ devices, and new Teams templates for wards and hospitals to enable administrators to deploy consistent healthcare experiences in Teams across their wards, departments, and hospitals.

With Teams, clinical staff can now quickly communicate and collaborate in a secure, compliant environment that brings together messaging, voice and video calling and meetings, as well as access to patient information and apps in one hub for teamwork. With Teams, customers can manage hospital operations like shift scheduling, safety processes, supplies, bed capacity, length-of-stay, and other critical operations.

New platform enhancements support healthcare data interoperability

As the healthcare industry moves to digitize patient data, enabling the interoperability of data has become a top priority. Microsoft is addressing the challenges of interoperability through emerging standards such as FHIR, providing new opportunities for digital transformation across the care continuum. Teams provides a hub to access digital health records and collaborate in real-time—streamlining workflows for clinical and operational professionals to help create better patient outcomes.

Today, we’re announcing the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams. Now, hospital and clinical staff on-the-go can securely access patient records, chat with other team members, and even start a video meeting, all without having to switch between apps. The ability to view EHR data in Teams is enabled through partnerships between Microsoft and leading interoperability providers, including Infor Cloverleaf, Dapasoft, Datica, Kno2, and Redox.

Image of a laptop and a PC displaying Microsoft Teams.

By integrating with electronic health records, Teams enables healthcare teams to use a secure hub for coordinating patient care.

Leading healthcare organizations choose Teams for secure collaboration

Today, 420,000 organizations, including 89 of the Fortune 100 and many of the most innovative healthcare providers, are empowering their employees with Microsoft Teams. Organizations including New York State’s largest healthcare provider Northwell Health; South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust; and Saiseikai Kumamoto Hospital in Japan have all chosen Teams to enable secure productivity and collaboration for their medical staff.

In addition, Microsoft commissioned the global research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan to complete an evaluation of Microsoft 365 for healthcare organizations, concluding that Teams directly addresses the top challenges facing healthcare providers with a modern, chat-based communication tool that doesn’t require compromising on security and compliance.

“Based on our research, Microsoft Teams directly addresses the top challenges facing healthcare providers in electronic messaging in hospitals and health systems.”
—Greg Caressi, Frost & Sullivan

Join us at HIMSS19 and learn more

Next week, members of the Microsoft team will be at HIMSS19, the annual Health Information Management Systems Society conference. Visit us at Microsoft booth #2500. Also, please visit Microsoft 365 and health page and partner site to learn more about how Teams and Microsoft 365 can empower your healthcare teams.

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Preparing for a new era in privacy regulation with the Microsoft Cloud http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2018/04/16/preparing-for-a-new-era-in-privacy-regulation-with-the-microsoft-cloud/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 22:00:48 +0000 Microsoft has extensive expertise in protecting data, championing privacy, and complying with complex regulations. Microsoft adheres to a set of privacy principals and offers EU Model Clauses to all customers. We believe that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an important step forward for clarifying and enabling individual privacy rights. As the GDPR enforcement date nears,

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Microsoft has extensive expertise in protecting data, championing privacy, and complying with complex regulations. Microsoft adheres to a set of privacy principals and offers EU Model Clauses to all customers. We believe that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an important step forward for clarifying and enabling individual privacy rights.

As the GDPR enforcement date nears, your organization may soon need to demonstrate that it has taken appropriate steps to protect your customers’ personal data in response to regulatory audits and information requests.

Implementing appropriate security controls is a key step to demonstrating accountability. Equally important is putting the right processes in place—such as responding to a Data Subject Request (DSR) and providing a breach notification—to help you be GDPR compliant and gain the trust of your customers.

Today, we are announcing several new resources and capabilities to help you respond to GDPR obligations with the Microsoft Cloud. These updates include:

  • Public preview of new privacy resources across the Microsoft Cloud.
  • New capabilities to help with DSRs across Microsoft Cloud services for GDPR.
  • New audit-ready, privileged access management capabilities in Office 365.
  • Enabling a single Office 365 tenant to span across multiple Office 365 datacenter geographies.

Read on for more details and several other updates.

Enhance your ability to meet GDPR obligations with the Service Trust Portal

To support GDPR, today we are announcing the public preview of new GDPR-related tools and resources—including DSRs and data breach notifications for Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, Windows, Intune, and Professional Services on the Service Trust Portal.

The GDPR resources include documentation on data breach notifications, which describes when and how Microsoft will notify you and others about personal data breaches, what information Microsoft will provide, and the tools you can use to help ensure the right people in your organization are notified.

We have centralized all our DSR resources into a single page, which provides tools you can leverage in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center and the Azure Admin Center—along with documents to guide you through the process of locating, exporting, and erasing data from a Microsoft Cloud service.

Visit Service Trust Portal privacy resources to learn more.

Responding to DSRs across Microsoft Cloud services

To support DSRs across Microsoft Cloud services, we are implementing several new capabilities—including a Data Privacy tab in Office 365, an Azure DSR portal, and new DSR search capabilities in Dynamics 365.

  • Office 365 Data Privacy tab—To help you effectively and efficiently manage your Office 365 related DSRs, we added the Data Privacy tab (in preview) to the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. Under the Data Privacy tab, you will find a section dedicated to GDPR, which includes documentation and resources to help you on your GDPR journey, as well as a tab dedicated to the execution of a DSR.

The new DSR experience is designed to provide you with the tools to create a case for a data subject request, search and refine relevant data across Office 365 locations—such as Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Groups, and now Microsoft Teams—and export the data.

One DSR scenario an organization may encounter is when a departing employee requests that their data is provided to them. To help with this scenario and others like it, the Event-based retention feature of Advanced Data Governance is now generally available for Office 365 E5 customers.

Learn more about the Data Privacy tab in Office 365 and Event-based retention in Advanced Data Governance on the Tech Community blog.

To see how the DSR experience in Office 365 works, watch the Mechanics video:

 

  • Azure DSR portal—We plan to release the ability to process Azure DSRs before the May 25, 2018 GDPR compliance deadline. Azure tenant admins will have a simple, powerful tool to quickly process the DSR for GDPR. Using the Azure DSR portal, tenant admins can identify information associated with a user and then correct, amend, delete, or export the user’s data. Admins can also identify information associated with a data subject and will be able to execute DSRs against system-generated logs (data Microsoft generates to provide a given service).

Azure DSR portal to help process a DSR.

To learn more, visit the Azure blog.

  • Dynamics 365 DSR search capabilities—To help customers respond to DSRs in Dynamics 365, we are providing two new search capabilities: Relevance Search and the Person Search Report. Relevance Search gives you a fast and simple way to find what you are looking for and is powered by Azure Search. The Person Search report offers a pre-packaged set of extendible entities, which Microsoft authored, to identify personal data that is used to define a person and the roles they might be assigned to.

Handling data breaches under the new GDPR regulations

For GDPR, organizations must meet stricter requirements in the event of a data breach. This includes notifying both regulators and those impacted by a breach—generally within 72 hours of becoming aware of a data breach. Microsoft 365 has a robust set of capabilities that can help protect, detect, and respond to data breaches. For example, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) protects an organization’s Office 365 ecosystem by helping prevent malicious emails or business critical files from compromising a user account. Windows Defender ATP focuses on protecting against malicious web-based files or device malware from corrupting a user account.

ATP Safe Attachments blocking malicious email attachment.

In the event Microsoft identifies a personal data breach as defined by the GDPR, we will notify your tenant administrator. Additionally, we recommend that you also designate a privacy contact alias in Azure Active Directory who will also be notified in addition to notification of admins.

Collecting, processing, and reviewing user consent with Azure Active Directory

With GDPR, companies now need a way to process consent from a user as well as have audit-ready reporting. With Azure Active Directory terms of use, organizations now have an easy way to collect, process, and review user consent. You can require a user to view and consent to your organization’s terms of use before they’re able access to an application. ​The terms can be any document relevant to your organization’s business or legal policies.

Example of an Azure Active Directory terms of use with multiple languages.

To learn more, review our Azure Active Directory terms of use documentation.

Leverage audit-ready controls for privileged admin access

While organizations look to minimize the risk of data breaches from threats to privileged accounts, they are also finding that they need to respond to regulators and provide a documented trail of privileged access, which outlines the scenario of how a customer’s data is accessed. To help organizations protect their data and respond to these compliance obligations, today we are introducing new privileged access management capabilities in Microsoft 365—which provide audit-ready access controls that are time bound and can limit the scope of data access.

With privileged access management in Office 365, you can better protect your data by tracking or enforcing an approval workflow scoped to your high-risk tasks within Office 365. For example, broad admin privileges enable admins to execute tasks that can provide unfettered access to organizational data, such as a journal rule, which can send emails to an external mailbox and exfiltrate sensitive data undetected. Privileged access management in Office 365 enables you to apply policies that require approval before anyone can execute these high-risk tasks. Requests for access can be automatically or manually approved, and all this activity is logged and auditable. Watch this video to learn more:

We are excited about rolling out the public preview of privileged access management in Office 365. To get started, visit the Office Previews page (enter the code PAM044), and then read the detailed Tech Community blog.

Addressing global data residency requirements

Increasingly, governments, third-party regulators, and corporate compliance requirements are enacting data residency guidelines to address privacy issues. These guidelines restrict the free flow of information across borders and require that an organization’s data is stored within defined geographies. While GDPR does not mandate data residency, many customers tell us they need the flexibility to store their data in chosen geographies to meet regional, industry-specific, or organizational data residency requirements.

Multi-Geo Capabilities enables a single Office 365 tenant to span across multiple Office 365 datacenter geographies and gives customers the ability to store their Office 365 data at-rest, on a per-employee basis, in their chosen geographies. Multi-Geo has been launched for Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business. Read “Get Global data location controls with Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365” to learn more.

Get started today on your GDPR journey with the Microsoft Cloud

No matter where you are in your GDPR efforts, we are here to help on your journey to GDPR compliance and have several resources available to help you get started today:

Learn more about how Microsoft can help you prepare for the GDPR.

—Alym Rayani, director of Microsoft 365

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Empowering clinicians to achieve more with Health Team Huddle templates http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-ca/microsoft-365/blog/2018/02/28/empowering-clinicians-to-achieve-more-with-health-team-huddle-templates/ Wed, 28 Feb 2018 14:00:30 +0000 Today’s post was written by Diana Pallais, managing director of Microsoft 365 Industry Marketing. Improving quality of care depends on many things—including overcoming complex care environments and cybersecurity threats. Since Microsoft 365 is built for teamwork, healthcare organizations can increase the effectiveness of their quality improvement processes and coordination of treatment plans, and enable research

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Today’s post was written by Diana Pallais, managing director of Microsoft 365 Industry Marketing.

Improving quality of care depends on many things—including overcoming complex care environments and cybersecurity threats. Since Microsoft 365 is built for teamwork, healthcare organizations can increase the effectiveness of their quality improvement processes and coordination of treatment plans, and enable research projects. Our new Health Team Huddle templates for developers extend Microsoft Teams to help drive quality and care outcomes by enabling collaboration with more effective huddle teams.

Every day, many times a day, health teams huddle to address patient care issues—tackling quality, safety, and management issues. But many teams rely on outdated modes of communication without an easy way to centralize health team notes, create actionable plans, and visualize patterns of patient symptoms. Critical patient information can fall through the cracks with these antiquated processes. Digitizing the huddle creates a single place to interact as a team. This integrated space for collaboration helps providers be in tune with their patients and improves the quality of care.

With the Health Team Huddle templates, you can:

  • Measure and visualize impactful best practices across your organization.
  • Identify patient care issues and potential causes.
  • Share ideas with your health team using natural conversations.

Reimagining the huddle process is one way that Microsoft 365 can empower health teams to securely work together with intelligent tools and solutions to share ideas and improve quality of care. And this is built on the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, which provides built-in security at all levels, leveraging trillions of data signals with machine learning. Microsoft has a long track record of building security and privacy into how we design and develop software. To build a trusted cloud platform for health teams, Microsoft has more than 1,100 internal controls to meet multiple regulatory requirements and industry standards, including HIPAA BAA and FedRamp.

We have a number of partners with healthcare industry expertise who are ready to assist you by understanding your needs and tailoring a solution that meets your requirements.

Our key partners include:

  • AvanadeFrom the back office to Frontline doctors and nurses, Avanade helps our clients deliver more effective, efficient, and affordable healthcare. Our Digital Workplace practice utilizes the secure and regulatory compliant Microsoft toolset to give caregivers access to the information, applications, collaboration, and automation they need to work more effectivelyany place, any time, and on their device of choice. At HIMSS18, Avanade will present a case study of how we used Microsoft Teams to deliver a Virtual Tumor Board that is driving higher utilization while creating a better work experience for caregivers.
  • New Signature—As life expectancy increases and health issues become more complex, patient care must become more connected and focused on preventive, continuous health. Microsoft 365 and Azure are opening up new opportunities to meet these challenges head on and enable healthcare organizations and professionals to change the way they work. New Signature’s Healthcare Team Collaboration Labs use Microsoft’s latest digital workplace solutions together with prototype use case templates to help you reimagine your team communication, collaboration, and connected patient care.
  • Rapid Circle—The Incident Reporting solution helps healthcare institutions prioritize, automate, and analyze your current incident reporting process. By using Microsoft Teams as a hub for your healthcare team to collaborate and report incidents, they are enabled to help professionalize current processes and improve patient handling.
  • SADA Systems—Serving the needs of healthcare organizations nationwide, SADA Systems specializes in collaboration, virtual health, telemedicine, cybersecurity, data and analytics, and custom application development. We are excited to leverage Microsoft Teams to further empower collaboration solutions for health teams. With a proven track record in enterprise consulting, cloud platform migration, custom application development, managed services, user adoption, and change management, SADA successfully enables healthcare organizations by delivering on all Microsoft Cloud solutions.
  • Slalom—Slalom’s “Jumpstart your productivity with Teams” offering enables health organizations to drive productivity by leveraging Microsoft Teams as the hub for teamwork. The offering takes a user-centric approach to identify appropriate personas and collaboration scenarios and determine dependencies. This offering enables health organizations to roll out Teams in just three days by providing a comprehensive adoption and change management plan, in addition to a roadmap for care collaboration execution in healthcare scenarios.

To learn more about our healthcare resources, visit Microsoft 365 for Partners Industry Practice. We also have provided a set of templates for Bots, PowerApps, and SharePoint lists, so developers can create their own health team huddle solutions. As an open source project, we actively encourage participation in the community of other like-minded developers. To get more information about the reference solution being shared, please check out our blog on dev.office.com.

—Diana Pallais

The post Empowering clinicians to achieve more with Health Team Huddle templates appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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