December 2023

Dec 21, 2023   |   Jason Kellington

Evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva

We’re learning a lot from deploying Microsoft Viva here at Microsoft, lessons we want to share with you. Microsoft Viva is a digital employee-experience platform that brings together essential capabilities such as communications, knowledge, learning, and workplace insights in the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best. Powered by Microsoft...

Dec 20, 2023   |   Keith Boyd

Reinventing Microsoft’s employee experience for a hybrid world

At Microsoft, we believe our employees are the company’s greatest asset. That’s why, in 2017, we determined that for Microsoft to achieve its mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, we would need to transform the way we do IT. Why change? We realized that to help our...

Dec 19, 2023   |   Inside Track staff

How Microsoft employees are leveraging the cloud for file storage with OneDrive Folder Backup

Any device, no matter the operating system, is susceptible to a ransomware attack or a device crash. Microsoft OneDrive Folder Backup (known as Known Folder Move) is a policy deployed by Microsoft that automatically syncs the contents of a user’s critical folders—Documents, Desktop, and Pictures—to the cloud to protect it in the event of device...

Dec 15, 2023   |   Lukas Velush

Transforming employee engagement at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Engage

Keeping people connected in a hybrid work world is no easy task. But with the right technology, you can help employees in newly reimagined work environments feel energized and engaged, even when coworkers can’t be physically present. That’s exactly what we designed Microsoft Viva Engage to do. To capture those benefits, we rolled out Microsoft...

Dec 15, 2023   |   Lukas Velush

Doing more with less: Optimizing shadow IT through Microsoft Azure best practices

You don’t know what you don’t know. In the world of IT, illuminating those hidden areas helps stave off nasty surprises. When elements of IT infrastructure are shrouded in mystery, it can lead to security vulnerabilities, non-compliance, and poor budget management. That’s the trouble with shadow IT—a term for any technical infrastructure that conventional IT...

Dec 14, 2023   |   Lukas Velush

Harnessing first-party patching technology to drive innovation at Microsoft

We live in a world where network security is a foundational concern for large enterprises like ours that are trusted with sensitive customer data. This creates an environment where we all need to ensure that we have high patching compliance across our massive array of devices. This complexity requires that we continuously improve our patching...

Dec 14, 2023   |   Alex Fleck

Shifting to paperless contract lifecycle management to help schools navigate COVID-19

[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.] Paperless contract lifecycle management (CLM) suddenly became more important during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, when schools had...

Dec 13, 2023   |   Alexa Phillips

Transforming how Microsoft executives use their time with Microsoft Outlook calendar analytics

Executives at Microsoft are using calendar analytics to save themselves something precious—their time. No matter who you are, if you don’t stay on top of your calendar, it can take on a life of its own. It’s very easy to lose control of how many events and meetings we have each day, week, or month....

Dec 13, 2023   |   Lukas Velush

Hardware-backed Windows 11 empowers Microsoft with secure-by-default baseline

Windows 11 makes secure-by-default viable thanks to a combination of modern hardware and software. This ready out-of-the-box protection enables us to create a new baseline internally across Microsoft, one that level sets our enterprise to be more secure for a hybrid workplace. “We’ve made significant strides to create chip-to-cloud Zero Trust out of the box,”...

Dec 12, 2023   |   Emily McKeon

Unlock our six tips for managing your support content with AI and ChatGPT

Like many large Enterprise organizations, Microsoft’s support team develops thousands of troubleshooting guides, self-help resources, knowledge base articles, and process documentation for our support engineers to leverage AI and ChatGPT when helping customers with technical issues. As we have grown over the years here at Microsoft and with the continuous release of new products and...

Dec 12, 2023   |   Lukas Velush

Best practices and tips from Microsoft’s own internal adoption of Microsoft Viva

At Microsoft, we’ve learned a thing or two in the two years since we launched Microsoft Viva, the first employee experience platform built for the hybrid era. And now we are excited to share some of our best practices and tips for ensuring your own roll out is effective and you gain traction with your...

Dec 11, 2023   |   Stacy Souza

Rethinking supplier content at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Automate

Connecting and communicating with a global network of suppliers, vendors, and business partners is no small task. Microsoft is tackling this challenge internally with Microsoft Power Automate, a cloud-based app that creates automated workflows. The result? Content that previously took the company days or weeks to deliver can now be published in minutes. Microsoft SupplierWeb...