When an external company submits a payment invoice to Microsoft, they must provide what’s called proof of execution (POE) to Microsoft invoice approvers proving that the service was indeed performed. Hence the virtual mountain of visual evidence of not just cupcakes, but entire lunch buffets, swag orders, promotion campaigns, and more, contained in files of Microsoft PowerPoint decks, PDFs, and Microsoft Word documents.

Microsoft’s Audit team in Microsoft Finance periodically reviews subsidiaries to, among other things, make sure that invoice approvers, vendors, and suppliers are following company procurement policies and processes to protect company assets and interests.

Matching cupcake photos are a flag of possible recycled POE—signaling that a vendor may have reused an existing image, which is not considered legitimate proof of the service provided.

Fei Guo is a senior data solutions manager for Microsoft Strategy and Solutions Technology, which is dedicated to analyzing business needs for the ARC team and connecting them with solutions. She was tasked by her business users to explore solutions for detecting recycled POEs using machine learning so they could easily find those needles in the haystack.

“Finding reused POE documents is extremely difficult for a human to do,” Guo says. Because manually comparing millions of images isn’t possible, auditors would typically test POs based on random samples. “We needed a way to detect similar images at scale.”

[Find out how Microsoft applied Azure Cognitive Services to automate partner claim validation. Learn about automating revenue processing at Microsoft with Power Automate.]

The Goldilocks algorithm

Guo brought the challenge to an engineering team in Microsoft Audit and Compliance within the Microsoft Cloud + AI organization.

They formed a volunteer team to explore audit digitization using machine learning built entirely on Microsoft Azure as a project for a Microsoft Hackathon, a yearly event where employees from across the company are invited to come up with freeform projects and solutions in an intensive three-day session.

We know recycled POE is an industry-wide problem. We could solve it using new technology in areas of ML that I was excited to learn about.

– Anuj Bansal, principal software engineer, Microsoft

“We know recycled POE is an industry-wide problem,” says Anuj Bansal, a principal software engineer for Commerce Financial Systems (CFS) who joined the Hackathon. “We could solve it using new technology in areas of ML that I was excited to learn about.”

If it worked, audit digitization using Azure technology had the potential to transform the auditing process, from just using samples at a minuscule proportion of the actual data volume to enabling the company to audit 100 percent of its data with greater accuracy in far less time.

The team presented a proof of concept for their solution at the Hackathon, which they called the Recycled POE tool, and won leadership support to further develop it into reality.

The first part was figuring out how to extract the data from the invoices, given the many different types of files and formats. Each POE typically generates around 10–12 images. ARC tests 10,000 purchase orders on average each year, and the volume grows by around 1 million images annually. They applied Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to extract images from MS Invoice POE files to standardize the process across all document types.

Next came the bigger challenge: finding the most accurate algorithm.

They built a custom machine learning tool using an algorithm called a Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graph to calculate the similarity score between images.

We’re transforming audit from reacting and sampling to a more live approach where you audit in a way that humans can’t.

– Jose De Jesus Sanchez Rico, senior software engineering manager, Microsoft

“We went through a lot of the standard algorithms,” Bansal says. “Some were too slow; some were too sensitive. Others were faster, but we saw too many false positives and didn’t get the best results. It was a journey to figure out which algorithm was the right one for us.”

With the “just right” algorithm, images are now processed using the HNSW graph in batches and saved to a Microsoft Azure SQL database. All of this runs in the background while auditors can focus on other tasks, and the results are delivered to them in a Microsoft Power BI report.

After nearly a year experimenting and fine-tuning, the new ML features were launched last September. The system can process 21,000 images per minute, allowing large-scale detection of similar images submitted as POEs for different purchase orders.

“The significance of this is that we’re transforming audit from reacting and sampling to a more live approach where you audit in a way that humans can’t,” says Jose De Jesus Sanchez Rico, a senior software engineering manager for Microsoft’s Core Functional Engineering who managed the team that developed the Hackathon project into production. “It’s having that perspective of what only ML can do for you.

Human learning

There’s still more that audit digitization can do for Microsoft.

The team is working on fine-tuning the results further by filtering out noise in the data such as logo images contained in documents and email signatures. The ML model can be strengthened still by feeding it more precision image metadata like time stamps and geotags.

The Recycled POE tool has also been recently integrated with another innovation of the audit digitization journey: a Microsoft Teams audit digitization assistant bot that auditors can access to perform common functions.

Taking the solution a step further, the team is also hoping to extend the Recycled POE tool to be used by invoice approvers as a proactive compliance check, rather than a reactive one, to catch mistakes before they’re made in the first place.

Jagannathan Venkatesan, a principal group engineering manager for Microsoft Finance Management, which oversees the Audit and Compliance team, says that he was especially impressed by the Hackathon team’s perseverance and eagerness to learn more about machine learning.

“There were setbacks and challenges from a performance perspective, but the team didn’t give up,” Venkatesan says. “We worked with the partner engineering teams, got guidance on how to improve, and we pulled it through.”

That makes them even better prepared for whatever comes next.

“We work in Finance, and we work with a lot of data, so data science and ML have always been areas where we want to learn,” Venkatesan says. “So, we took this as an opportunity to make an impact but at the same time, educate the team so that my engineering workforce is prepared for the technology shifts of tomorrow.”

• Find out how Microsoft applied Azure Cognitive Services to automate partner claim validation.
• Learn about automating revenue processing at Microsoft with Power Automate.

The post Boosting internal audits at Microsoft with audit digitization, machine learning appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

That may sound pretty handy, but all those tools can also be a burden, especially for the engineers who have to keep them sharp. It can also be confusing for employees to have to switch between different tools and user interfaces for filing expenses.

Microsoft has built up its collection of corporate expense tools over the years, onboarding various internal and third-party expense management platforms through acquisitions and because of different business needs. As the weight grew heavier, so did the need to address their maintenance issues.

“We had multiple tools that needed streamlining,” says Amruta Anawalikar. She is a senior program manager for Microsoft Commerce Financial Services (CFS) in Finance Engineering, the team under Azure Cloud + AI that manages expenses at Microsoft. “We wanted to reduce employee productivity costs and improve operations, engineering capacity, and business capacity.”

[Find out how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and machine learning. Learn more about migrating critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.]

Flipping the design

These disconnected systems were working across 110 countries and regions with no synchronization, each with its own vertical infrastructure. The system to manage them all had been built up piece by piece.

Because of varying configurations specific to local environments, deployments were no small task. Expense categories, policies, and payment rules differed across tools. None of the systems even spoke the same language—“report name” in one tool might be called “report description” or “expense purpose” in another.

Solving for these issues through tool customizations wasn’t an option, either, because one of the primary tools (a third-party product) didn’t support the API integrations needed for that kind of flexibility.

Standardization and unification were badly needed.

We’ve flipped the whole design. By generalizing the entire ecosystem and focusing on a modern Azure-based design, it allows multiple tools to exist.

– Sumeet Deshpande, Microsoft CFS Finance Engineering

“Historically, the efforts were really focused locally within each tool and over the years, each ended up having its own over-customized, tool-centric designs built around them,” says Sumeet Deshpande. He is a principal software engineering manager for CFS Finance Engineering. “Even though the systems were very similar, we couldn’t leverage the same components.”

Deshpande’s team set out to create a unified expense management experience that put engineering before process.

“We’ve flipped the whole design,” Deshpande says. “By generalizing the entire ecosystem and focusing on a modern Azure-based design, it allows multiple tools to exist, and the problems we were having in over-aligning to the specific tools have gone away.”

The modernization journey

Microsoft’s journey to build a modern backend pipeline to unify its corporate expense tools began two years ago, with a milestone that became a catalyst for change.

In 2019, the legacy tool MSExpense 1.0 was being retired. Faced with 110 countries and regions to migrate (and myriad tax and statutory regulations to go with them), the team expected the migration to MSExpense 2.0 to take two to three years and cost an estimated $2 million. But then they decided to try a new strategy.

“That’s the point where we started thinking differently in how our tools need to be either onboarded or retired,” says Mohit Jain, a senior software engineer who led the retirement for CFS Finance Engineering.

They started breaking big problems down into smaller pieces, dividing countries and regions into buckets based on their level of complexity and tackling the migration one at a time.

The entire migration took just six months, and cost nothing.

“This was a really important part of our journey and how we approached problems going forward,” Jain says.

Building on that momentum, the team implemented a major overhaul of the user experience in 2020 and introduced OneExpense, automating much of the process with built-in machine learning to essentially eliminate the need for employees to file expense reports at all.

According to Deshpande, that’s what set the stage for remaking the back end.

“MSExpense 1.0 was retired at rocket speed,” he says. “We built on that and delivered end-to-end automation. That was a powerful story for leadership—people started to listen to us after that.”

Meet the hero: Microsoft Azure’s architecture

With a firm engineering mindset and funding to move forward, the mission to modernize was on.

Microsoft Azure provided the cloud base that would help the team achieve their internet-first, top-down goal. Whereas the structures of the third-party expense tools were locked, Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company’s powerful suite of business solutions software, swooped in to stretch their flexibility.

Key to that flexibility was building a disconnected architecture that allowed the team to create a plug-and-play modular design that enabled any individual system to be swapped in or out.

“We can literally replace any component, with Dynamics 365 as a unified mechanism for any expense tool that exists,” Deshpande says. “Our primary hero is the modern Azure-based design, which really synergizes reusability across expense tools and allows multiple tools to exist because they have been there for a valid reason. The most important piece within it is Dynamics 365, but that’s just one part of the puzzle.”

Standardization was also a fundamental piece.

As part of the earlier automation project, Anawalikar had gathered extensive market research data to standardize policies. By reaching out to different markets as well as other large tech companies to investigate the sources of governance, they were able to trim a lot of fat and create a universal set of standards and definitions.

This enabled Jain to create what they called the OneExpense contract: a common data language that would allow the siloed systems to understand each other.

“Whatever expense tool you run your infrastructure on, eventually we converted that tool-specific data to a OneExpense contract,” Jain says. “It was a very important piece to make a contract that’s tool agnostic—that’s what we need for our downstream needs.”

Anawalikar calls it something else: “The holy grail.”

“Everything in this ecosystem, right from automation to expense reporting, is based on the expense contract,” she says. “We need to protect it at all costs.”

Those vertical structures in the architecture that made management of the corporate expense tools so labor-intensive were up for disruption as well, and were restructured horizontally.

This is where Dynamics 365 really has an edge. It gives us that flexibility of customization, which will make it extendable for any future needs as well.

– Mohit Jain, senior software engineer, Microsoft CFS Finance Engineering

“When they’re horizontal, they’re the same across different systems,” Jain says. “Even with different tools, the overall experience remains the same because the tool-specific data was converted to a generic OneExpense contract.”

At the core of the system, the team built its Data Integration Service: an orchestrator that controls various microsystems for calculating taxes, sending statutory forms, and sending emails to approvers. Functioning much like an orchestra conductor, the orchestrator queues each system at the right time to perform the right function, sometimes each playing solo, and other times in harmony with other instruments.

“Adding up all of those microservices would have been really difficult in any other system,” Jain says. “This is where Dynamics 365 really has an edge. It gives us that flexibility of customization, which will make it extendable for any future needs as well.”

The tool belt of the future

The Finance Digital team is already enjoying life in the modern expense management world.

Deployments are easy, having gone from 100 percent manual (with a lot of typos) to standardized configurations deployed with 90 percent automation.

Modular plug-and-play components include a tax calculation system and a centralized automated auditing system that’s more efficient at flagging errors. Plus, self-monitoring and self-healing tools detect and fix issues behind the scenes before they’re flagged by employees filing help tickets.

With all of this comes greatly reduced operational costs, higher productivity, and employees who no longer have to view expense filing as a laborious, confusing task that interrupts the main focus of their jobs.

As Anawalikar says, one of the primary goals achieved is to “make expenses less expensive.”

“This expense story today is a showcase of everything Azure Cloud + AI has to offer, namely the power of Azure Cloud, the use of AI and ML, and the use of Dynamics 365,” Deshpande says.

What gets Deshpande and his team really excited as they iterate further is the architecture’s modular ability to work with any corporate expense tool.

“If Dynamics 365 evolves and rolls out multiple advanced versions, it will still work,” Deshpande says.

Jain is also looking forward to a future state in which the architecture is even lighter-weight and Microsoft Dynamics 365 is truly functioning as the Swiss Army knife of all corporate expense tools.

Along the way, the team has experienced what it feels like to be part of a team that’s empowered by research, data, and its own supportive leadership.

“We were encouraged to challenge the status quo and ask questions,” Jain says. “We used disruption for a positive outcome.”

• Find out how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and machine learning.
• Learn more about migrating critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.

The post Transforming Microsoft’s corporate expense tools with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Like everywhere else, filing expenses has long been a chore most employees at Microsoft sought to avoid.

And the numbers back that up.

Instead of spending their time developing new technologies, Microsoft employees spend more than 500,000 hours per year itemizing and filing expense reports.

That’s about to stop.

The team that manages expense report filing in Microsoft Digital at Microsoft has a plan for eliminating 70 percent of that effort.

What’s their plan?

Automating expense reporting.

Ask about filing expense reports at Microsoft, and it seems everyone can recall a horror story of tedium, whether scanning endless receipts, calculating currency conversions based on different daily exchange rates, or manually entering the individual names of 25 employees attending an off-site to cover coffee.

Worse, many times they have to use three different tools to get the job done.

With such high figures of lost productivity—and employee dread—it’s no wonder the Microsoft Finance Management team saw potential for major improvement.

“Because the experience was pretty bad, the confidence we had that we could solve complex business problems with engineering solutions led us to improve the user experience,” says Sumeet Deshpande, a principal software engineering manager who led the effort for Microsoft Finance. “We decided to show what the power of AI, machine learning, and end-to-end automation can be.”

[Find out how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning. Learn more about how Microsoft automates revenue processes with Power Automate.]

Engineering over policy and process

Like many innovations at Microsoft, the launch pad for the automating expense reporting project was born out of the Microsoft annual Hackathon, an event where employees are encouraged to gather to develop breakthrough ideas. In this case, the Microsoft Finance engineering team used the 2019 hackathon to successfully prove that they could use automating expense reporting as a solution to relieve one of the company’s biggest employee pain points.

With leadership support in hand, Deshpande’s team laid the groundwork by identifying the most painful steps in the expense filing process. They then bucketed them into a dozen different engineering problems to solve.

One of the biggest challenges was the fact that expense filing processes varied greatly across regions and countries. Even more challenging, all these systems were implemented across multiple expense tools.

Extensive research to track down original policy decisions that regulate what an employee is allowed to expense revealed a pleasant surprise, though, says Sahil Garg, principal director of software engineering for several domains of Microsoft Finance.

“We found that 90 percent of the processes were common across countries,” Garg says. “They looked different, but they could actually be standardized.”

The next key piece on the way to a pilot launch was to identify the easiest and lowest-risk expense transaction categories that would begin teaching the machine learning (ML) models. For this, they turned to Microsoft’s “road warriors”—employees who travel frequently and have highly categorical and predictable expenses, such as airfare, taxis, and hotels.

“These are also people who need to file a lot of expense reports,” says Amruta Anawalikar, senior program manager for Microsoft Finance. “One person said that creating a report is so long and tedious, they have to put on a ‘Game of Thrones’ episode, and that’s the only way they can get it done. That really struck a chord with me—we want to ease that pain.”

It required a lot of experimentation, and how we thought of things theoretically wasn’t necessarily possible. But now we feel there’s a fully-tuned solution.

– Sumeet Deshpande, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Finance

Drawing on data from two primary sources of truth—receipts and credit card transactions—the engineers made the decision to take a “receipt first” approach to automation. Whereas credit card data may take a couple of days to flow in, receipts are generated immediately upon a transaction, which makes this the most expedient initial input.

Finally, the team brought in other technologies that were readily available to them within the Microsoft Azure stack, integrating them together on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 business platform. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology would help scan the receipts and extract data, then apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Azure ML models to provide context and meaning to the data.

“All of these tools at our fingertips allowed us to build an enterprise-level expense system,” Deshpande says. “It required a lot of experimentation, and how we thought of things theoretically wasn’t necessarily possible. But now we feel there’s a fully-tuned solution.”

UnXpensing expenses

The new way of filing expense reports at Microsoft is to not file an expense report at all.

“As engineers, we want to make life easier for all of us,” says Chinmaya Rath, a senior software engineer and lead developer for expense automation who coded much of the solution now called OneExpense. “Why does the employee have to go to a tool? Let’s bring it to them, and let’s make it a nearly touchless experience.”

Now, when an employee makes a purchase on their corporate credit card, they immediately get an alert via Outlook Actionable Emails (or wherever they want to receive their alerts).

A familiar user interface meets the employee wherever they are, thanks to the use of Microsoft Adaptive Cards which uses small snippets of UI code that can adapt to any environment. This taps into the power of multiple enterprise scale platforms Microsoft offers, like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or an internal employee app known as MyHub.

It’s all about letting employees choose the experience they like best.

The system reads the receipt, auto-populates an expense line for it, intelligently applies the appropriate cost category, and sends it to the employee for review. The employee can make any necessary adjustments and submit it then and there. Or if they take no action, the system automatically submits the expense four days later.

“Instead of asking the user to go do one big boring monolithic report in the expense tool, we have broken the experience into smaller, logical micro-actions that happen in context,” Deshpande says.

In addition to taking the compliance burden off employees, the team needed to build employee confidence and trust into the system while keeping employees compliant with corporate expense rules.

So, the machine learning is trained to detect anomalies by applying a line-level confidence score to each transaction. Only high-scoring expenses are submitted automatically, while low-scoring items are flagged to the employee or their manager for additional review.

“We found an intelligent way to only submit the pieces that make sense,” Garg says. “And our intelligence grows stronger all the time.”

For example, a $500 coffee charge may raise a red flag, but when cross-referenced with other API inputs, such as a Microsoft Outlook calendar item for a large off-site, it could make sense. By shifting the auditing process from manual work to automation, the system is expected to meet greater compliance levels than ever before.

Configurability was also key to creating a smooth experience.

“We recognize that employees want flexibility,” Rath says. “Maybe they want to be notified for individual transactions, while others just want to see them all at the end of the day or week.”

So Rath and the team created functionality allowing employees to set preferences to automatically bundle transactions according to a particular category or timeframe.

“Let people spend money where they need to,” Garg says. “On the back end, we’ll intelligently connect the dots. Expense as an entity is gone.”

A complex expense report that would have taken someone at least 40 minutes to complete can now be done in less than five minutes. Overall, this time reduction is estimated to translate to $50 million in potential soft-dollar savings each year.

“We just eliminated ‘complex’ from the expense dictionary,” Deshpande says. Deshpande even has a new word for it: “UnXpensing.”

The road to nirvana

There is still much work to be done.

After the pilot phase, the new OneExpense experience is ready to be rolled out to all 140,000 Microsoft expense users. As the system continues to learn and get smarter, Deshpande and their team are dreaming bigger about what automating expense reporting will allow them to do.

Some of that includes refinements, such as standardizing hotel inputs and tackling the variety of evolving receipt categories the system might encounter. In the future, actionable alerts will be extended to additional platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cortana, and the employee MyHub mobile app.

The team is also working on further reducing the attention required by managers and approvers by applying those line-level confidence scores to document headers for easier reference.

Pooja Sund, a principal program manager who recently joined the effort to help roll OneExpense out company-wide, says the beauty of OneExpense is just how limitless it is.

“We have gone above and beyond just solving the problem,” Sund says. “We’re building on the big bets like the goodness of the Azure stack and building layers of flexibility on top of it.”

Deshpande says that means potentially extending the framework beyond expenses.

“This can work for any employee reimbursement scenario at Microsoft,” Deshpande says.

Plus, thanks to the inherent agility built into the Dynamics 365 platform, the system has no external dependencies, says Mohit Jain, a senior software engineer and lead developer for Expense automation.

“It doesn’t matter which expense platform you’re working on top of. It works with any expense solution on the market that offers an API,” Jain says. “Dynamics 365 is great in that way—it has a very future forward-looking architecture.”

Down the road, Sund says, there is broader potential for automating corporate expense reporting at enterprise level.

“We’re connecting different siloed teams and tools, building on big bets and the goodness of the Azure stack,” Sund says. “You’re not just creating new experiences for our internal employees. You can leverage that functionality and power, take the feedback you get, and bake it into the product so you can take it outside. That will be the nirvana state.”

The team really embraced that entire mindset of creating delight, meeting the user where they are, being compliant and secure by design, and getting the human out of the loop. That cultural work we’ve done pays off with this kind of innovation.

– Brad Wright, director of software engineering, Microsoft Finance Management

For the Microsoft Finance team at large, this larger automating expense reporting opportunity represents more than just a major accomplishment in redefining an age-old corporate process.

This transformation is also about pride of ownership.

“The team really embraced that entire mindset of creating delight, meeting the user where they are, being compliant and secure by design, and getting the human out of the loop,” says Brad Wright, director of software engineering for Microsoft Finance Management. “That cultural work we’ve done pays off with this kind of innovation.”

• Find out how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning.
• Learn more about how Microsoft automates revenue processes with Power Automate.

The post Automating expense reporting at Microsoft boosts employee experience appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

If Microsoft smart buildings had brains, what would they do with them?

Maybe they would perfectly heat and cool themselves, sending energy to the right places at the right times. Maybe they would greet visitors and help them find their way, boosting their productivity by getting them to a meeting more quickly or boosting their blood sugar level by helping them find the nearest on-campus eatery. Maybe they would breathe oxygen into stuffy conference rooms.

These are exactly the kinds of things Microsoft smart buildings will soon be able to do, something that will be on display when the company begins opening its new buildings at its Puget Sound headquarters in late 2023.

The transformation of Microsoft smart buildings is being powered by Microsoft Azure Digital Twins, a platform that enables developers to create digital replicas of physical environments in real time.

It was the time to ask ourselves, “what is the future of work at Microsoft, and how do the spaces we work in help make it amazing?”

– Bill O’Brien, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

Launched to public preview in 2018 and to general availability in 2020, Azure Digital Twins is a key smart buildings enabler. It’s a centerpiece of a Microsoft smart buildings pilot that launched in one Puget Sound building in January 2021 as part of the larger campus modernization project. This multi-year renovation project aims to create a world-class work environment with low environmental impact.

Microsoft’s real estate team has partnered with Microsoft Digital and the Microsoft Azure product group to make the new Microsoft smart buildings more intelligent from the perspectives of both employee usage and facilities management.

“Microsoft knew it was making a big investment in a major new campus development and that it would roll out worldwide,” says Bill O’Brien, principal PM manager at Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms Microsoft. “It was the time to ask ourselves, ‘what is the future of work at Microsoft, and how do the spaces we work in help make it amazing?’”

The real estate team is using Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices with Azure Digital Twins to integrate inputs from previously siloed data sources such as motion and occupancy sensors to evolve the way Microsoft employees interact with their spaces, with a focus on efficiency and productivity.

In addition to enhancing the employee experience, insights yielded from Azure Digital Twins integrations have helped these partnered teams at Microsoft in multiple aspects of the campus project, from day-to-day operations to future real estate planning.

[Learn more about how Microsoft is creating the digital workplace. Find out how Microsoft uses machine learning to develop smart energy solutions.]

Synchronization between brain and body

Throughout the journey to give a building a brain and bring it to life in a physical body, the team has encountered the interdependencies of any complex organism.

“A building project and a software project are very different,” O’Brien says. “In software, we have very agile development and we can easily move things around. You can’t do that with buildings.”

Effectively aligning software development timelines to construction milestones proved key to the process.

Eric Slippern, the principal software architect for the campus modernization project for Microsoft Digital, says the team also overcame challenges in integrating myriad third-party IoT devices, from heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC) systems and elevators to lighting and security, into a single system that could integrate with services and solutions such as Microsoft Azure Maps, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

“Azure Digital Twins allows us to integrate IoT sensor telemetry from tens of thousands of devices across the globe,” Slippern says. “We can easily understand the enterprise context of these signals and aggregate them at a floor or building level. It’s the engine that enables us to leverage real-time insights to enhance the comfort and productivity of our employees and guests.”

In collaboration with RealEstateCore, a Swedish consortium of real estate owners, software houses, and research institutions, Microsoft released an open-source smart buildings ontology built on Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL), which was instrumental in enabling devices from many vendors to talk to Azure Digital Twins. That includes everything from HVAC to security and lighting devices, and both Brownfield (legacy) products and Greenfield (modern IoT) devices.

The smart building pilot on the Redmond campus in January marks a monumental moment that tees up the wider rollout to dozens more buildings in the near future.

Working smarter in intelligent spaces

In Microsoft smart buildings that have been engineered for productivity, the difference is noticeable from the moment an employee or business guest walks through a building’s front door.

A welcome kiosk powered by Azure Digital Twins greets visitors in the lobby. There they can do things like locate individuals they plan to meet, identify unoccupied meeting rooms, and check out daily menus and café station wait times before grabbing lunch. When leaving, they can quickly arrange transportation to another location on campus.

“We really put the focus on user-centered design,” says Sonaly Choudary, program manager for SmartBuilding services kiosks. “How does this experience enable our employees to be more productive? How can we meet their immediate needs of that moment?”

Using this in the actual construction of buildings, I can spec so much out before it’s even built. We can land on a design much earlier in the process.

– Scott Weiskopf, director of Center of Innovation, Microsoft

A mobile app available to Microsoft employees will soon use indoor location services powered by Azure Maps to help an employee navigate to their destination within the building. They can also personalize the environment of their meeting room by controlling the temperature and other settings.

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHuGQ1o2DDs, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

For facilities managers, the system offers not only reactive controls, but the possibility of proactive planning. Knowing whether rooms are empty or occupied can inform heating and cooling functions to improve energy efficiency, for example. Air quality can be monitored to adjust the carbon dioxide flow or humidity levels to maintain a healthy environment. Signals from IoT sensors can also trigger maintenance alerts to make early fixes before a piece of equipment breaks.

Scott Weiskopf, director of the Center of Innovation at Microsoft, says Azure Digital Twins is a powerful tool from a planning perspective, enabling a better-informed approach to his team’s design work.

“Using this in the actual construction of buildings, I can spec so much out before it’s even built,” Weiskopf says. “From designing for accessibility to seeing how furniture brand changes might impact a project cost and timeline, we can land on a design much earlier in the process.”

Plus, O’Brien says, Microsoft smart buildings that have been constructed with the proper IoT and Azure Digital Twins integration can continue to feed into the construction cycle.

“This helps us monitor a building’s actual performance against its design parameters,” he says. “It gives us data to know where a building may need alterations based on usage.”

For Microsoft Digital, it’s a testament to the organization’s commitment to improving employee experiences and operations.

“The project is essentially the digital transformation of real estate,” O’Brien says.

For Microsoft’s customers looking to develop smart buildings as well, Microsoft’s own campus modernization project will be the ultimate demonstration of the product’s potential.

“The Microsoft campus installation is an at-scale implementation of Digital Twins,” says Akshay Johar, principal PM manager for Microsoft Azure IoT. “You could not have a better test for this project at such a level inside the company. If the campus succeeds, Microsoft and its partners can tackle anything with Digital Twins.”

• Learn more about how Microsoft is creating the digital workplace.
• Find out how Microsoft uses machine learning to develop smart energy solutions.

The post Powering Microsoft smart buildings with Microsoft Azure Digital Twins appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Most people don’t give much thought to printing.

In the best-case scenario, you select a button and your paper comes out. Other times, you might have to fiddle with locating printers, driver installations, and of course, the occasional paper jam. There are good reasons why this most humble of office essentials is also a common symbol of office frustrations.

IT administrators like Kathren Korsky think about printers a lot more than most.

As a senior service engineering manager for End User Services at Microsoft, Korsky oversees their organization’s printing strategy and infrastructure. That means maintaining print servers, ensuring connectivity, managing security permissions, and staying on top of compatibility issues with a broad network of third-party hardware partners.

It also means dealing with the security risk printer servers create.

How do printers create such challenges?

Before, anyone who wanted to print in a Microsoft office had to connect to Microsoft’s corporate network. That meant giving them VPN access just so they could print something.

“Corpnet is a very precious corporate asset, and VPN access ends up being a security liability,” Korsky says. “We must eliminate our print service dependency on VPN to achieve our strategic Zero Trust goals.”

Adding to these acute pains were the everyday aches of Microsoft branch offices without corpnet connections at all, where employees were severely constrained when attempting to print to a shared printer, not to mention the maintenance and high energy costs that physical servers consume.

Then about four years ago, Microsoft Digital began migrating all of its internal servers to the cloud, a project that transitioned 95 percent of its physical servers to Microsoft Azure virtual machines (VMs).

[Learn how Microsoft used Azure to retire hundreds of physical branch-office servers. Find out how Microsoft enabled secure and compliant engineering with Azure DevOps. Unpack seamless and secure cloud printing with Universal Print.]

Connecting printers to the cloud

Korsky’s team joined that cloud migration, and over four years they reduced the company’s 320 on-premises print servers around the world to around 80 Microsoft Azure print server VMs. The team benefited from Microsoft Azure’s security and management capabilities while achieving a print server uptime improvement to nearly 100 percent.

Korsky says the 70 hours per month their team formerly spent patching servers has been reduced to seven.

While the move to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivered great benefits for the print service, that was not enough. The team needed a solution that could work completely in the public internet space and draw on the advantages of becoming a Platform as a Service (PaaS) approach, which was going to be the next step in the print service transformation.

Working together with Microsoft’s Azure + Edge Computing team, they experimented with a previous offering, Hybrid Cloud Print, but felt that more was needed to simplify the administrator’s experience.

Seeing an opportunity, Korsky and their team knew the moment was ripe for a major transformation that would not only greatly reduce their administrative overhead, but also eliminate those pesky corpnet dependencies while enabling public internet connectivity in a safe and secure way.

Working together, Microsoft Digital and Azure + Edge Computing teams built in robust management capabilities and easily accessible data insights and reporting, and a new printing experience called Universal Print was born.

As Universal Print began to roll out to groups across Microsoft, beginning with the Azure + Edge Computing team, one of the challenges was the wide variety of different brands, makes, and models of printers that would need to integrate with the service.

“We as a product group wanted to support a broad set of currently available printers in market, and some of them are quite old,” says Jimmy Wu, a senior program manager for Azure + Edge Computing who worked with Korsky’s team to deploy Universal Print into the Microsoft infrastructure. “The challenge was how do we do that when our service isn’t even publicly available at the time.”

As a solution, they created a piece of connector software that served as a communication proxy between the physical printer and the cloud service. It’s now available to customers as part of their Universal Print subscription.

With the migration and product rollout complete, Universal Print was validated in private preview by Microsoft customers who also saw a need for a cloud print service. It then moved into public preview in July.

Printers are now being published in Microsoft Azure Active Directory through a centralized portal, with little need for on-premises infrastructure or maintenance.

What’s more, the elimination of on-premises servers and all the physical space, energy consumption and cooling systems that go with it help support Microsoft’s commitment to achieve carbon negativity by 2050.

For branch office managers grappling with whether to invest in costly corporate network setups, Korsky says, “it solves for some real business decisions that companies have to make about branch office locations.”

And the employee who just needs to print? They can think about it even less.

“What’s really great is that our users benefit from a seamless, familiar print experience,” Korsky says. Users click a button and their paper comes out—without all the interference of printer discovery, network permissions and driver installations standing in their way.

Universal Print in a remote world

The ability to print via the cloud has proven to be an unexpected boon to businesses and organizations who have had to quickly adapt to operating remotely.

Alan Meeus, a product marketing manager for Microsoft 365 Modern Work, says that of the more than 2,000 external customers currently testing Universal Print, many have accelerated their adoption amid COVID-19.

“Even with people working remotely, there are many use cases for why print is still important,” Meeus says. “There’s a lot of printing going on in critical industries like healthcare, manufacturing, distribution and education. In schools, some kids don’t have access to computers and they still rely a lot on printed materials.”

Universal Print has also helped enable Microsoft 365 users to perform work functions at home that they previously couldn’t.

“If our HR or payroll department needs to run checks, they can do that from home,” says Scott Hetherington, a senior systems analyst for the Wild Rose School Division in Alberta, Canada. “Being able to give them Universal Print right now has been a lifesaver. And it’s been able to help keep people safe in the face of a pandemic by keeping them home as much as possible.”

As more organizations ramp up adoption, the Universal Print team and their partners are looking forward to cultivating a circular feedback loop where they’re gathering feedback from the community and delivering the kinds of improvements customers want. They’re also working towards a longer-term vision of evolving from the IaaS cloud service model for the connector software to going completely serverless, requiring no infrastructure management at all.

For Korsky, it’s all about the growth mindset.

“This has been an amazing journey of experimentation to learn what works well and where changes are required. And we’re partnering in a more collaborative way,” Korsky says. “We took our learnings from Hybrid Cloud Print and came up with this whole new approach that is even better than we originally envisioned, and we’re having great success.”

The printing transformation is making a difference with Korsky’s peers across Microsoft.

“My team’s amazing partnerships with engineering teams across Microsoft allow us to develop impactful internal solutions that also benefit our customers,” says Dan Perkins, a principal service engineering manager in Microsoft Digital’s End User Services. “Universal Print simplifies how we manage our work and reduces the time we spend maintaining our infrastructure. It also improves the security of our print service. We are excited about what the future holds for this transformational offering.”

• Unpack seamless and secure cloud printing with Universal Print.
• Learn how Microsoft used Azure to retire hundreds of physical branch-office servers.
• Find out how Microsoft enabled secure and compliant engineering with Azure DevOps.

The post Jamming to a new tune: Transforming Microsoft’s printing infrastructure with Universal Print appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The highly complex system was 20 years old and difficult to move on from when, five years ago, the company decided a transformation was needed.

These phone calls are how Microsoft talks to its customers and its partners. We needed to get this right because our call management system is one of the company’s biggest front doors.

– Matt Hayes, principal program manager, OneVoice team

Not only did Microsoft install an entirely new call management system (which is now fully deployed), it did so on next-generation Microsoft Azure infrastructure with global standardization, new capabilities, and enhanced integration for sales and support.

“These phone calls are how Microsoft talks to its customers and its partners,” says Matt Hayes, principal program manager of the OneVoice team. “We needed to get this right because our call management system is one of the company’s biggest front doors.”

Looking back, it was a tall order for Hayes and the OneVoice team, the group in charge of the upgrade at Microsoft Digital, the engineering organization at Microsoft that builds and manages the products, processes, and services that Microsoft runs on.

What made it so tough?

The call management system was made up of 170 different interactive voice response (IVR) systems, which were supported by more than 20 separate phone systems. Those phone systems consisted of 1,600 different phone numbers that were dispersed across 160 countries and regions.

Worst of all, each of these systems was working in isolation.

[This is the second in a series on Microsoft’s call center transformation. The first story in the series documents how Microsoft moved its call centers to Microsoft Azure.]

Kickstarting a transformation

The OneVoice team kicked off Microsoft’s bid to remake its call management system with a complex year-long request for proposal (RFP) process. The team also began preparations with the internal and external stakeholders that it would partner with throughout the upgrade.

To help manage all these workstreams, projects were divvied up into categories that each had their own dedicated team and mandate:

Architecture: This team considered network design and interoperability with the cloud.

Feature needs: This group was charged with ensuring the new system would support business requirements and monitoring needs. They were also tasked with calling out enhancements that should be made to the customer experience.

Partner ecosystem: This team made sure the needs of partners and third-party players were considered and integrated.

Add-on investments: This group made sure cloud space needs were met, addressed personnel gaps, and pursued forward-looking opportunities.

These initial workstreams became the pillars used to guide the transformation of the call management system.

The key to the upgrade was the synergy between the OneVoice team and the call center teams scattered across the company, says Daniel Bauer, senior program manager on the OneVoice team.

“We decided we were going to move to the cloud—after that was approved, we knew it was time to bring in our call center partners and their business representatives,” Bauer says. “That collaboration helped us build a successful solution.”

Early input from these partners guided the architectural design. This enabled the team to bake in features like end-to-end visibility of metrics and telemetry into both first and third-party stacks. It allowed them to manage interconnected voice and data environments across 80 locations. Importantly, it also set early expectations with telecom service providers around who would own specific functions.

Designing for scale by starting small

Bringing myriad systems together under one centralized roof meant the team had to build a system that could handle exponentially greater amounts of data and functionality.

This required a powerful cloud platform that could manage the IVR technology and a call routing system that would appropriately direct millions of calls to the right agent among more than 25,000 customer service representatives.

“Just the scope of that was pretty intense,” says Jon Hoyer, a principal service engineer who led the migration for the OneVoice team.

The strategy, he says, was to take a regional line of business approach. The OneVoice team started the migration in a pilot with a small segment of Microsoft Xbox agents. After the pilot proved successful, the process was scaled out region by region, and in some cases, language by language within those regions.

“There was a lot of coordination around the migration of IVR platforms and call routing logic while keeping it seamless for the customer,” Hoyer says.

Ian McDonnell, a principal PM manager who led the partner onboarding for the OneVoice team, was also faced with the extremely large task of moving all the customer service agents to the new platform.

For many of these partners, this was a wholesale overhaul that involved training tens of thousands of agents and managers on the new cloud solution.

“We were replacing systems at our outsourcers that were integral to how they operated—integral to not only how they could bill their clients, but enabled them to even pay their salaries,” McDonnell says. “We had to negotiate to make sure they were truly bought in, that they not only saw the shared return on investment, but also recognized the new agility and capabilities this platform would bring.”

Build and deploy once, impact everywhere

When a change is made to a system, no one wants to have to make that change again and again.

When we had 20 separate disconnected systems at our outsourcers, it was an absolute nightmare to make that work everywhere. Now we can build it once and deploy that experience across the whole world.

– Ian McDonnell, principal PM manager, OneVoice team

One of the biggest operational efficiencies of the new centralized system is the ability to build new features with universal deployments. If the hold music or a holiday message needs to be changed, rather than updating it on an individual basis to every different phone system, that update goes out to all suppliers at once.

“When we had 20 separate disconnected systems at our outsourcers, it was an absolute nightmare to make that work everywhere,” McDonnell says. “Now we can build it once and deploy that experience across the whole world.”

Previously, there was no option to redirect customers from high- to low-volume call queues, leaving the customer with long waits and negatively impacting their experience. Now, with a single queue, customers are routed to the next available and most appropriate customer service agent in the shortest time, whether the agents sit in the US, India, or the Philippines, providing additional resilience to the service.

This cloud native architecture allowed for new omnichannel features such as “click-to-call,” where customers who are online can request a callback. This allows seamless continuity of context from the secured online experience to a phone conversation for deeper engagement.

As the OneVoice team explores what’s next in add-on investments, they’re exploring a wide range of technologies and capabilities to modernize the call center environment. One of the primary areas of focus is leveraging the speech analytics technology of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, which can provide deeper insights into customer satisfaction and sentiment.

In an upcoming blog post in this series, the OneVoice team will share how an in-house development leveraging Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services allowed the team to revolutionize customer sentiment tracking and identify issues before they become major problems.

To contact the OneVoice team, and learn more about their customer support cloud journey, email them at onevoice@microsoft.com.

• Find out more about Microsoft’s decision to move its call centers to the cloud.
• Learn more about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation.

The post Streamlining Microsoft’s global customer call center system with Microsoft Azure appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead for Microsoft in Western Europe and a former Microsoft Azure field seller based in Vienna, set out to talk to other Microsoft Azure sellers to discover how to help them serve their clients better.

For a multi-billion dollar business with more than 3,000 sellers, the potential for impact was huge.

– Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead

What emerged was a common pain point around exploding data. An enormous amount of customer data was being produced, but it was being siloed into different systems that never connected. Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs) and Microsoft Azure specialists would have to go into Microsoft Azure portals for customer data, Microsoft Dynamics 365 to track their customer engagements, and the Microsoft Account Planning Tool to manage account plans.

For Microsoft Azure sellers, whose mission is to help their clients be successful with their cloud experience, it was difficult to get a clear picture of how their accounts were performing. They were spending hours analyzing their data, running it through their own Microsoft Excel sheets and Microsoft Power BI reports, before finally sharing their insights with their account teams which required even more hours spent building Microsoft PowerPoint slides.

“For a multi-billion dollar business with more than 3,000 sellers, the potential for impact was huge,” Thiede says. “So how do you bring those teams together on the IT side to have a customer-centric view?”

Thiede realized that this was a great question to answer with a Hackathon project.

Thiede assembled a team that included data scientists, field sellers, security specialists, and Microsoft Power Platform developers who were all passionate about solving the problem. They set out to build a solution using Microsoft Power Platform while demonstrating how IT and sales teams could come together in a citizen developer approach.

Within two weeks, the team had come up with the S500 Azure Standup Cloud Cockpit, a tool that brought all the data together in a configurable dashboard that put the individual sellers in the pilot seat.

For Jochen van Wylick, a cloud solutions architect, Hackathon team member and the lead CSA for strategic accounts in the Netherlands, that meant there could finally be a real tool to replace all of the manual unofficial hacking they had been doing to try to layer data in a meaningful way.

Van Wylick showed the team how they were adding additional metadata to the dozens of engagements they were tracking in their CRM to stay organized, and they incorporated that capability in an automated way.

“I like the fact that Alex implemented these ideas in the Stand Up Cockpit,” van Wylick says. “I also like the fact that it will boost my productivity.”

[Learn how Microsoft has automated its revenue processing with Power Automate. Find out how Microsoft is monitoring end-to-end enterprise health with Azure.]

The Microsoft Power Platforms and the power of citizen development

The team wanted to enter the Hackathon competition with a viable product to wow the judges. So, they used the Microsoft Power Platform to create a low-code tool that proved the feasibility of the Stand Up Cockpit while demonstrating how sales and IT teams could innovate together using a citizen developer approach.

Collaborating across six different regions on three continents in the first all-virtual Hackathon, the IT team members built the application environment while leaving the user interface up to the sellers to customize as they wished.

Stefan Kummert, a senior business program manager for Microsoft’s Field App and Data Services team, built the cockpit’s components on Microsoft Power Platform. Kummert says the challenge was the ability to create composite models layering Microsoft Power BI data with Microsoft Azure data analysis. While this is in fact a new Microsoft Power Platform Power Apps feature slated for release sometime in November, it wasn’t available to them at the time of the Hackathon in July.

“So, we tried to remodel this concept, more or less,” Kummert says. “We factored what’s available out of the box with some other Power Platform building blocks, and that’s what gave us all the functionality we needed.”

Sellers could now integrate their data sources into a composite data model, add custom mapping and commenting, gain insights at the child and business unit levels, and more quickly identify issues and potential for optimizations that would serve their clients. At the end of the Hackathon, they had a working prototype using real customer data.

The team largely credits this agility to the citizen developer approach, which empowers non-developers to create applications using low-code platforms sanctioned by IT. “There’s often not enough time to create applications in the classic way,” Kummert says. “I think citizen dev is changing the picture significantly, giving us a fair chance to address the huge amount of change happening in the business environment.”

Microsoft’s 2020 Empower Employees hackathon category. With their win, they were awarded dedicated resources and sponsorship from Microsoft Digital.

Turning the dream into reality

Fresh off their Hackathon win, the team is now working on moving the app into production and getting it into the hands of Microsoft Azure sellers.

They’ll first roll it out to 10 customers, then another 100, and if it’s successful, it will be built into the core platform and scaled out across the Microsoft Sales Experience, MSX Insights, Microsoft Organizational Master, and Microsoft Account Planning programs.

This rapid prototyping and incremental rollout is a strategy targeting increased adoption–an approach that’s appreciated by program managers like Henry Ro, who maintains sales and marketing platforms for Microsoft Digital.

Without the Hackathon, it would have been harder to bring this team together. Rather than doing this just once a year, why not have it as a regular working style? It’s about the energy, the inclusive culture, and the people coming together who have real passion.

– Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead

“Projects like the Azure Cockpit really make it easy for our team and others to validate an idea and take it to fruition,” Ro says. “We’re excited about its capabilities and how we can enable it.”

For their part, Thiede and the team are already itching for another Hackathon–or at least more projects driven by the same kind of inspiration and agility.

“Without the Hackathon, it would have been harder to bring this team together,” Thiede says. “Rather than doing this just once a year, why not have it as a regular working style? It’s about the energy, the inclusive culture, and the people coming together who have real passion.”

• Learn how Microsoft has automated its revenue processing with Power Automate.
• Find out how Microsoft is monitoring end-to-end enterprise health with Azure.

The post Microsoft Azure sellers gain a data edge with the Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.