When our employees look for content internally here at Microsoft, they go to Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot first. With Business Chat, they can easily get answers to questions, catch up on missed work, generate new ideas, and more by tapping into the work data that they have access to via Microsoft Graph.

An employee might ask, “Can you tell me how I can learn more about AI in Healthcare and who the experts are in the company?”

Whether they ask in Microsoft Teams or another Microsoft 365 app, or right in their browser, they likely will get a helpful, accurate response very specific to the healthcare sector. The answer could refer to an AI industry PowerPoint presentation, articles on responsible AI strategies, Microsoft Research publications, or a list of employees who are experts on the topic.

But how does Copilot know how to reference the AI industry PowerPoint presentation for Healthcare? How does it know which versions of the responsible AI strategies for Healthcare articles to use? How does it identify experts in the company?

It’s because Copilot connects to all the content on the topic available through Microsoft Graph.

“Our internal Microsoft content is the content Copilot uses to generate its results,” says Dodd Willingham, a principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital, the IT organization at Microsoft. “How Copilot consumes and uses our content determines the success—or failure—of Copilot for our employees.”

{Learn how AI is already changing work—including here at Microsoft. Check out how we’re reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint Premium.}

Enabling useful results

When it comes to returning the right content with Copilot, context is key.

Copilot uses the capabilities of Microsoft Graph to power its AI-generated results. For Microsoft Digital—like most organizations—that includes the content our users store and work with in our Microsoft 365 tenant. Results from Copilot directly depend on the quality of the content it uses. There’s an enormous opportunity to increase the capabilities of Copilot-based solutions because the underlying content is of such high quality. We’re seizing that opportunity to get this right internally at Microsoft.

“You hear a lot of people talking about Copilot, but few address the importance of improving content quality,” says Stan Liu, a senior product manager and knowledge management lead with Microsoft Digital. “The quality of an organization’s content management must be considered in every implementation of Copilot, and we’re doing some great things at Microsoft Digital to ensure Copilot returns accurate, relevant, and up-to-date responses.”

It’s an exciting time to be in content management, and we’re excited to share how our team in Microsoft Digital has met and addressed the challenges of preparing our content for a bright future with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Curating enterprise content for Microsoft 365 Copilot

There’s an urgency for organizations to bring advanced AI tools to their employees, but it must be done thoughtfully and with good intentions. One of the fundamental challenges in implementing generative AI technologies like Copilot is balancing the desire to move quickly with the need for caution with technology possessing potential risks that haven’t been fully revealed.

“A lot of what we do lies in managing our content in a way that aligns with company strategy, and Copilot isn’t different in that respect,” says David Johnson, a tenant and compliance architect in Microsoft Digital who ensures that the company’s content is well governed. “It’s important that Microsoft employees understand why content management is important and how they can help do it well.”

To be effective, we must lean into our ongoing culture shift to embrace knowledge sharing. We’ve been fostering a knowledge-sharing culture at Microsoft for years, and our adoption of Copilot has magnified the importance of that culture and the need to continue driving awareness and education for Microsoft employees.

Liu and his team are prioritizing this culture transformation.

“You need to build and encourage a culture that embraces user-driven content management,” Liu says. “Teams that document their knowledge, follow a content lifecycle in their workflows, and manage content consistently across the company are contributing hugely to what we’re trying to accomplish.”

It’s a two-fold challenge that involves encouraging and supporting our employees in collaboration and sharing and ensuring that the tools they use—including Copilot—provide results they can trust and use confidently.

“We’ve set goals within our organization to make Copilot a daily habit,” Liu says. “Community engagement and participation is a significant part of Copilot adoption, and we’ve been identifying use cases and success stories across Microsoft to share as success stories to inspire our employees and encourage adoption and innovation.”

Next generation content management with SharePoint Premium

Microsoft SharePoint Premium (formerly known as Syntex) is a critical part of our content management strategy to get the most out of Copilot. We’re using the AI capabilities in SharePoint Premium to give employees access to simple and capable content management tools.

SharePoint Premium helps our Microsoft Digital enterprise content team ensure the right capabilities are in place to help people manage content. Missing metadata is a common issue with information stored in SharePoint, and SharePoint Premium makes it easier for users and administrators to add metadata, classify and organize content.

SharePoint Premium brings AI, automation, and added security to our content experiences, processing, and governance. SharePoint Premium delivers new ways to engage with our most critical content and prepare it for Copilot, helping us manage and protect it throughout its lifecycle.

Automating metadata extraction with document processing

The document processing capabilities in SharePoint Premium simplify and automate the process of extracting important information from existing content. Liu’s team helped deploy the document processing capabilities across Microsoft to enable teams to automate processing of important content, such as contracts, invoices, and statements of work.

Document processing uses machine learning models to recognize documents and the structured information within them. Using optical character recognition (OCR) combined with deep learning models, it identifies and extracts predefined text and data fields common to specific document types, including contracts, invoices, and receipts. It also supports the detection and extraction of sensitive data such as personal and financial identification. Liu’s team is using prebuilt and custom document processing models to automatically populate metadata columns in SharePoint for many different document types. The metadata this processing provides improves search and creates a more complete understanding of what the files contain, so Copilot can recognize and return relevant information that was previously incomplete or unavailable.

“We’re capturing information across a plethora of documents automatically and almost none of it was recorded previously,” Liu says. “Some of our business groups were entering the metadata manually, but it was a time-consuming and expensive process. For most documents, it just wasn’t done. It’s a massive difference-maker in finding information about a specific contract or invoice that would have been close to impossible. Now with SharePoint Premium and Copilot, it’s a simple question away.”

Standardizing content creation with content assembly

Liu’s team enabled the content assembly feature of SharePoint Premium across the company to simplify document creation and ensure that new documents follow metadata and structure guidelines.

Content assembly creates modern templates that can be easily maintained and used to generate repetitive documents quickly. This feature is particularly useful for departments like finance, where templates for partner letters or contracts are frequently needed. By using content assembly, teams can reduce the time spent on template management and document generation, as it allows for the creation of documents with just the key parts needing changes.

While the time-saving benefits of content assembly don’t directly affect Copilot results, they do encourage users to create better documents, eliminating the need to rewrite entire documents or repeatedly upload the same document. These documents—created using modern templates—are significantly more discoverable and classifiable and lead to more authoritative answers in Copilot.

Taxonomy tagging

Liu oversees a team that has been managing the company’s corporate taxonomy in the SharePoint term store for many years, maintaining a hierarchy of terms that can be reused throughout the SharePoint environment. The term store helps ensure that SharePoint metadata is consistent across the organization, and it provides employees with a standard set of choices when populating commonly used metadata such as products, job roles, or departments.

Taxonomy tagging in SharePoint Premium automatically tags documents in SharePoint libraries with terms configured in the term store using AI. As at other companies, we face the ongoing challenge of getting employees to tag content. Most times, even when you have managed metadata set up in your document library, employees often don’t use it. This means the content is never further enriched with that metadata.

With taxonomy tagging, you set it and forget it. Uploaded content is automatically tagged, which does the job that a person would typically do, but often never does. This automated process ensures that documents get one or more metadata columns populated with standard terms from the term store based on the document content. This leads to more complete metadata for documents and more authoritative results for Copilot results when referencing data in those documents.

Using generative AI to help generative AI with autofill columns

Autofill columns in SharePoint Premium takes content management to the next level by harnessing AI LLMs to automatically extract, summarize, and generate content from files uploaded to your SharePoint document library. This feature allows users to set up a simple natural language prompt on a column in SharePoint that extracts specific information or generates content from files. The extracted information is then displayed in the columns of the library, making it easier to manage and analyze data.

Liu has a lot to say about how his team is transforming document processing with autofill columns in SharePoint Premium, “autofill columns are a game-changer for enhancing productivity in Copilot and ensuring that our documents have the necessary context for efficient retrieval and use. Autofill’s impact on our metadata within SharePoint document libraries is huge.”

Teams within Microsoft have started setting up new and existing columns with prompts to identify the types of information to extract from a file. These prompts can be customized and tested to ensure that they provide the desired results. After the autofill columns are set up, any new files uploaded to the library are automatically processed (and existing documents can be manually processed), and the result of the prompt is saved to the corresponding columns.

This approach not only streamlines document processing workflows but also enhances the overall efficiency and accuracy of their data management practices, making Copilot even more powerful and effective.

Continuing to grow with SharePoint Premium

Liu’s team continues to drive SharePoint Premium as a crucial part of their content management toolkit. “We’re seeing immediate and significant benefits from using SharePoint Premium and its AI features to manage our content,” Liu says. “In the first half of 2024, we estimated that our employees saved more than 120,000 hours in processing documents, pages, and images across the company for over 1,000,000 content items in our environment. It’s a great start, and we’re targeting even greater improvements across more content soon.”

Protecting content with Microsoft Purview Information Protection

Microsoft Purview Information Protection provides a wide range of content governance capabilities that help us discover, classify, and protect sensitive information wherever it stays or moves in the Microsoft tenant.

We use Purview Information Protection tools to identify sensitive content using expressions, functions, and trainable classifiers. With these tools, our enterprise data teams and employees can use corroborative evidence like keywords, confidence levels, and proximity to identify sensitive information types. They can also use examples of sensitive content to train recognition engines on expected patterns. All of this helps to better inform Copilot regarding the relevance of our Microsoft 365 content.

We use sensitivity labels in Purview to apply flexible protection actions that include encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings. This capability ties in nicely with SharePoint Premium, which also uses and applies sensitivity labels.

Purview sensitivity labels provide a single labeling solution across apps, services, and devices to protect content as it travels inside and outside our organization. Purview sensitivity labels can be applied to Microsoft Office documents, third-party document types, meetings, chats, and the broader Microsoft 365 environment.

The sensitivity labels that we use to protect our content are recognized and used by Copilot to provide an extra layer of protection. For example, in Business Chat conversations, which can reference content from different types of items, the sensitivity label with the highest priority (typically, the most restrictive label) is visible to users. If the labels apply encryption from Microsoft Purview Information Protection, Copilot checks the usage rights for the user and only returns content that the user has access rights to.

Looking forward

Our enterprise content management transformation is ongoing.

Our teams are looking at new content management capabilities across the company to ensure Copilot continues to provide current, accurate, and relevant results for our employees.

We’re continually evaluating our enterprise content management to identify new ways to create a Copilot-assisted workday for Microsoft employees. We’re also evaluating new technology, organizational practices, and industry standards as we strive to set the standard for how an organization can capture maximum value from its content using Copilot.

We’re currently working with the SharePoint Premium product team to grow the AI-based capabilities for content management and classification. We’re experimenting with our own solutions and capabilities in SharePoint that will lead to the next generation of AI-supporting features that drive innovation and creativity here at Microsoft and for our customers.

Are you looking to prepare your enterprise content for Copilot and AI? Here are a few suggestions:

• Pursue content quality. Ensure that the content is current, accurate, and relevant. This is crucial for Copilot to provide authoritative answers and maintain user trust.
• Promote knowledge sharing. Foster a culture of knowledge sharing within the organization. Encourage teams to document their knowledge, follow a content lifecycle in their workflows, and manage content consistently across the company.
• Use SharePoint Premium. Use the AI capabilities in SharePoint Premium to simplify and automate content management processes.
• Implement Purview Information Protection Use Purview Information Protection tools to apply sensitivity labels to ensure content is protected as it travels inside and outside the organization.
• Prepare for future enhancements. Stay updated with ongoing transformations in enterprise content management and Copilot capabilities.

Try Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• Learn how AI is already changing work—including here at Microsoft.
• Here’s how you can get started with Microsoft SharePoint Premium.
• Learn more about Microsoft Purview.
• Check out how we’re reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint Premium.
• Discover getting to ‘search completeness’ internally at Microsoft.
• Find information faster: How Microsoft is transforming internal search.
• Explore how Microsoft redefines the digitally assisted workday.
• Unpack internal search bookmarks and how it boosts productivity at Microsoft.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Boosting Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot with smart enterprise content management appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Engaging our employees with AskHR

AskHR is our internal employee-engagement application that Microsoft Digital (the IT organization) built for supporting inquiries to Microsoft’s HR department and managing ongoing cases related to those inquiries. Our employees use the app to submit many diverse requests, from ones as basic as “Where can I get drinking water?” or “How do I apply for a specific benefit?” to more complex cases like moving to a new location or job or dealing with an illness. Based on these requests, the team of advisors at Microsoft HR engages with employees to ensure that their requests are fulfilled in a timely and efficient manner.

AskHR supports an intake of more than 4,500 new inquiries per day, using an array of channels, including email and web integrations with other HR platforms. Our global AskHR team consists of more than 1,400 HR advisors spread across 12 HR functions and divided into more than 250 HR support teams. Microsoft has more than 220,000 global employees.

Employee inquiries have been increasing exponentially in parallel with the increase in employees hired each year at Microsoft. In the past 10 years, we’ve gone from supporting a few thousand inquiries a year, to supporting more than 1 million employee inquiries and transactions annually. In addition, we now have rigid controls around access provisioning, review, country/region-mandated compliance, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and annual privacy reviews. We’ve also broadened our request intake mechanisms from email-based intakes to several other intake channels including Web API and virtual agent. Processes supported by AskHR include:

Support for global new-hire onboarding and internal employee transfer. We use AskHR for the complete employee onboarding process for new employees and employees transferring to new positions and business groups within Microsoft.

Support for former employees’ queries related to their employment history. Former employees can use AskHR to retrieve personnel files even after they’re no longer a Microsoft employee.

Transactional queries and access management for data-management teams. Our data teams can capture important insights across all aspects of the employee-inquiry process.

Employee and dependent benefits queries. All benefits queries are channeled through AskHR, and employees can retrieve applicable information and processes for researching or claiming benefits.

Complex employee inquiries. Hundreds of requests come through AskHR each day that range from hybrid-work support to employee performance to policy and governance reference. Many of these require specific involvement of HR staff and complex case-management activities.

Center of Excellence support queries. Many company programs originating from our central HR teams including rewards and hybrid work leverage AskHR as the primary employee experience interface to address questions and, where appropriate, route to experts for further consultation.

AskHR gives Microsoft HR the ability to react quickly to changes within our corporate environment. When COVID-19 hit, we were able to organize and prioritize pandemic-related cases, allocate advisors to the proper queues, and shift the focus of our HR support to meet needs on an ongoing basis, whether day-to-day or week-to-week, as different demands and situations came and went.

—Andrew Winnemore, general manager, HR Services

The need for AskHR reflects a larger trend in which HR—and the integral role it plays in key decisions—is becoming central to operations for companies of all sizes. With this change, the role of how HR engages with organizations’ employees has also shifted. For example, it’s understood that retaining employees today requires more than competitive compensation and benefits. Microsoft and other organizations must also consider how they engage with employees in critical support scenarios, while making sure that engagement is performed in a timely, relevant, and authentic manner.

“AskHR gives Microsoft HR the ability to react quickly to changes within our corporate environment,” says Andrew Winnemore, a vice president in HR Services. “When COVID-19 hit, we were able to organize and prioritize pandemic-related cases, allocate advisors to the proper queues, and shift the focus of our HR support to meet needs on an ongoing basis, whether day-to-day or week-to-week, as different demands and situations came and went.”

Transforming HR interaction with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform

We’re transforming the way we interact with our employees on AskHR with Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform. The tools and capabilities that these solutions provide have enabled us to build a robust and resilient employee engagement system that both our employees and advisors love to use.

We’ve built our entire HR support platform around Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform technologies. We’re using many of the built-in capabilities to better support Microsoft HR. Using technologies including AI and machine learning, Power Virtual Assistant, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams collaboration, and Customer Voice, we’ve enabled Microsoft HR to deliver a highly intuitive employee interaction solution that engages our employees in ways that were previously only equated with customer interactions.

—Mahesh Sharma, director, AskHR Cross Industry Solutions

Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides a suite of capabilities that enable us to deliver the best experience for our employees and HR advisors throughout the inquiry and case-management process. With its omnichannel capabilities, Customer Service allows Microsoft HR advisors to take customer requests from many different avenues, manage multiple sessions at a time, interact with multiple apps without losing context, and enhance their workflow with productivity tools.

AskHR is built around the core of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform. Most AskHR functionality is hosted in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and supported by other Dynamics 365 components and solutions built from the Power Platform. Examples of this functionality include HR case management, employee interaction, knowledge-base management, service-level agreement (SLA) management, and sentiment analysis.

“We’ve built our entire HR support platform around Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform technologies,” says Mahesh Sharma, a former AskHR Engineering PM Lead in Microsoft Digital. “We’re using many of the built-in capabilities to better support Microsoft HR. Using technologies including AI and machine learning, Power Virtual Assistant, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams collaboration, and Customer Voice, we’ve enabled Microsoft HR to deliver a highly intuitive employee interaction solution that engages our employees in ways that were previously only equated with customer interactions.”

Additional capabilities in AskHR are supported by several Dynamics 365 services and Microsoft Power Platform–built capabilities:

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice supports our employee feedback process with survey forms and workflows that are easy to create and manage. Customer Voice offers an agile and user-friendly interface to manage surveys that helps ensure that our employees feel empowered and encouraged to provide open-ended feedback. Employees can also provide timely and near-immediate feedback directly from the email they receive, which makes it more intuitive for them to respond to. These changes have increased our survey response from 9 percent to 22 percent over the last year.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights and Microsoft Power BI. Real-time reporting, insights, and analytics are an important part of day-to-day operational decisions by our advisors and key planning decisions by HR leadership. Customer Service Insights uses AI and analytics capabilities to identify and predict trends and other insights. The real-time insights that we receive from Customer Service Insights provide managers with business-critical information on the case volumes within their teams and trending topics that help them to better coordinate with other HR teams. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics built into Power BI reports are used to inform most HR-related support decisions.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Knowledge Management. Our HR teams use Microsoft Knowledge Base articles to curate, maintain, and govern responses to thousands of common requests using a single point of management and a common feedback loop. This process ensures that the articles are accurate and current. It also provides a single repository of answers for employees, eliminates duplication of materials, and reduces circulation of conflicting information.

Power Virtual Agent. Our Power Virtual Agent chat bot is becoming the default first triage agent on the web for AskHR. Power Virtual Agent has been managing approximately 15 percent of all AskHR inquiries globally. It’s emerging as the fastest growing method to respond to our employee inquiries and reduce the ever-increasing burden on our advisors due to the growth of our employee population over the past few years.

Power Platform AI Builder. We use AI Builder to analyze user sentiment, predict HR case activities, and triage cases to the appropriate queues. AI Builder provides prebuilt models and the ability to create custom models that support scenarios relevant to AskHR. These models continually learn and refine their behavior based on AskHR data. The models inform many aspects of employee engagement, including case routing, sentiment analysis, spam filtering, and automation activities.

Power Automate. We use Power Automate to simplify and expedite communication and process workflow activities throughout AskHR. These include notifying an advisor when a case is assigned to them, sending out an acknowledgement when employees create a case, or generating notifications whenever activities need to be created based on an event.

Generating business and technical value with native functionality

In an organization as large as Microsoft, the HR environment is broad and complex. Using Dynamics 365 and Power Platform enables us to achieve quality, resiliency, flexibility, and accurate observation in AskHR that far exceeds the capabilities of our previous solution and requires far less customization.

Deep collaboration with our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product groups has helped us deliver several advanced HR-related features, avoiding costly customizations. This has been a very symbiotic relationship where we proactively reach out to them for capabilities we want in the product and where they reach out to us to help validate future functionality they’re building into the product.

—Gayatri Garapati, AskHR engineering SWE lead, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Most functionality that we use in AskHR is based on native, out-of-the-box features supported by Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Services, which handle our large array of HR needs, from managing onboarding for almost 200 employees per month to ensuring that questions about benefits and resources are answered quickly and effectively. As a result of this simplicity, our design and engineering principles and practices are more easily achievable, and more robust and reliable.

Engineering excellence

Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital are Customer Zero for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform product group teams. By collaborating actively with the product groups, we help them implement several features that are critical to not only our HR needs but also to many external customers. As Customer Zero, we work with the product group teams, testing features and ensuring that the design and quality are completely ready for production environments before features are released for General Availability. At any given time, we have several Customer Service and Power Platform features in beta release that we’re co-innovating on with the product group.

“Deep collaboration with our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product groups has helped us deliver several advanced HR-related features, avoiding costly customizations,” says Gayatri Garapati, an AskHR engineering SWE lead in Microsoft Digital. “This has been a very symbiotic relationship where we proactively reach out to them for capabilities we want in the product and where they reach out to us to help validate future functionality they’re building into the product.”

Monitoring and alerts

We have alerts created for all applicable scenarios across AskHR use cases. We can audit alerts, perform proactive monitoring, and consolidate alerts as a result. The alerting system connects directly with our operations management and ticketing systems, using out-of-the-box capability. We use several monitoring scenarios and alerts to ensure that our employees and advisors receive the optimal HR experience and notify our engineering teams of potential issues. Some key examples include:

• Intake activities that aren’t converted to tickets.
• Emails that aren’t successfully sent to customers when advisors respond.
• Employee information that doesn’t match data stored in Azure Active Directory.

Data insights

Built-in data insight capability lets us leverage all data sources that support AskHR. We have reporting capabilities within each component, but also the capability to report across the entire AskHR landscape with Power BI. AI and machine learning capabilities support data analysis that helps our advisors and leadership understand all aspects of employee engagement.

For example, our Escalation Management dashboard helps HR teams identify important and urgent requests coming through AskHR. We introduced sentiment analysis as part of the Escalation Management dashboard to better understand escalation needs across employee requests, even if the employee didn’t mark the request as urgent in the interface. Sentiment analysis parses all inbound correspondences and communications from the employee, then identifies occurrences of negative sentiment or urgency and marks such cases as potential escalations. Escalation management functionality also reviews other information such as the number of queue hops and number of times a case is reopened to also flag them as potential escalations. These potential escalations are moved to the top of their queues so that HR advisors can proactively address these cases before they truly become escalations. Sentiment analysis has flagged more than 250,000 inbound conversations to date.

Driving dynamic and intelligent case-management activities

Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Power Platform enable our advisors and employees to work across the entire span of AskHR activities seamlessly and interactively, with real-time responsiveness and trackable processes. The following list contains the supported activities and components:

• Intake. Case intake is the entry point for employees to submit requests to Microsoft HR. AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Power Virtual Agents, and Microsoft Azure API Management to support a huge array of intake channels including our web-based portal, Virtual Agent, email, and API.
  
  Example: An employee in California uses the web portal to contact HR support requesting details on parental leave and policies. The AI builder model parses the details of the incoming conversation and associated employee metadata and identifies the Benefits Service Line as the best team to support the request. The case is routed to the queue for US benefits support.
• Handling. HR advisors need to understand and categorize incoming requests in preparation for engaging with employees to resolve a concern. Power Platform AI Builder, Power Apps component framework, and Dynamics 365 dashboards enable our advisors to capture case details quickly and easily by using AI for classification and sentiment analysis and providing relevant contextual information.
  
  Example: A benefit-related case raised by an US-based employee, flagged for urgent attention, surfaces onto a queue manager dashboard. The queue manager consults a real-time availability dashboard and assigns the case to an available advisor who specializes in US benefits policies.
• Assignment. Advisors are responsible for ensuring that cases are triaged properly and assigned to appropriate team members for resolution, but they don’t need to do all the work. AskHR uses Power Automate Workflow and the Dynamics 365 plugin framework to support automated triage for most activities, while routing difficult assignments to advisors for quick, efficient triage.
  
  Example: Upon receiving a new case in their dashboard, the advisor checks recent case history and other work-related details for the employee, using the contextual information associated with the case. They use Teams collaboration to reach out to a benefits specialist consultant to gather more information and ask questions. They can add notes into the case details.
• Response. Advisors engage with employees to provide answers, perform a transaction, gather information, or determine if they need to involve another team member in the case. AskHR provides automated insertion of knowledge-base articles into cases, use AI-based intelligent pre-search for surfacing relevant articles, and sentiment analysis to understand employee sentiment.
  
  Example: Advisor responds back to the employee with a Dynamics 365 article that answers the inquiry and provides some real-time details.
• Escalation and routing. AskHR supports automated escalation and routing across many scenarios, including employee sentiment, case lifecycle, and case classification. AI Builder and Power BI dashboards enable our advisors to manage and observe escalation and routing behavior at any point in the lifecycle.
  
  Example: After the employee has reviewed the details requested, they want to follow through with the parental-leave process. The benefits advisor contacts the employee to understand the details of their query. At any point in the escalation and routing process, the advisor might consult with subject matter experts in the query subject area, including the Center of Excellence program team.
• Resolution. Ensuring that a case is resolved properly is critical to engaging our employees effectively. AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service case categorization and the PowerApps control framework to provide advisors with the functionality they need to confirm resolution efficiently.
  
  Example: Having clarified all employee questions, the benefits advisor is ready to resolve the case. They verify the categorization done earlier and add closing case metadata that will help with analytics.
• Survey. After resolution, AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to collect employee feedback. Power BI reports and dashboards are in place to help advisors and Microsoft HR leadership identify successes and opportunities for improvement throughout the case-management lifecycle.
  
  Example: When the case is marked as resolved, a survey is automatically sent to the employee. Upon survey completion, the consultant’s manager can check the employee’s feedback and ratings for HR support.

AskHR uses Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to support the case management lifecycle at Microsoft HR.

Next steps

We’re not done. This is a continuous journey and we’re focusing on improvements to several areas, including advisor productivity, process automation, and live assistance. We’re also working with the product group to add and improve Dynamics 365 Customer Service capabilities, including unified routing, improved knowledge management, and deeper natural language understanding AI.

The HR advisors and front-end line managers love the low code flexibility that Power Automate provides. It helps them support complex business processes, while still working within the constructs of a well-defined case-management lifecycle. This allows the engineering team to focus on critical infrastructural and technological advancements, while HR advisors are empowered to create flows that best support their processes in a rapid and efficient manner. We’ve seen a steady 20 percent year-over-year increase in adoption of the platform through some of the most complex employee scenarios presented by COVID-19, hybrid workplace management, and employee investigations.

—Abhinav Jhingan, AskHR HR solution lead, HR Services

With Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Power Platform, AskHR has been resilient, scalable, and dependable, while giving us the freedom to adapt AskHR functionality to change and grow with our organization. We expect that flexibility to continue to improve as we seek to increase employee engagement, better support our advisor user base, and prepare for future HR-specific needs at Microsoft.

“The HR advisors and front-end line managers love the low code flexibility that Power Automate provides,” says Abhinav Jhingan, an AskHR HR solution lead in HR Services. “It helps them support complex business processes, while still working within the constructs of a well-defined case-management lifecycle. This allows the engineering team to focus on critical infrastructural and technological advancements, while HR advisors are empowered to create flows that best support their processes in a rapid and efficient manner. We’ve seen a steady 20 percent year-over-year increase in adoption of the platform through some of the most complex employee scenarios presented by COVID-19, hybrid workplace management, and employee investigations.”

Continued adoption of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform features across AskHR has delivered significant benefits for our HR users. Movement to our browser-based unified client interface has saved more than 3,000 advisor hours each month due to the streamlined interface. Our AI-based spam model has helped eliminate hundreds of thousands of incoming spam emails at 97.89 percent accuracy. We’ve also used AI to interpret user sentiment for approximately 1.4 million employee messages in the last six months. We’ve seen significant improvement in several areas of employee engagement and HR efficiency, including:

• Reduced case resolution time. Due primarily to automatic routing and contextual data sharing, we’ve reduced case resolution time by 18 hours per case, on average.
• Improved NSAT ratings. Our net satisfaction (NSAT) rating for employees and advisors has increased by almost 10 percent.
• Improved advisor productivity. Our advisors are spending approximately 12 minutes less per case than they did before AskHR.
• Increased first-time fix rates. Our rate for fixing an issue or closing a case after the first point of HR contact is 29 percent.

• Learn how Microsoft is helping its employees understand their value with the Total Rewards Portal.
• Find out how Microsoft is updating its core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors.
• See how Microsoft is reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world.

The post ‘Got a question?’ Boosting employee engagement at Microsoft with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we’re leaning on AI to enhance our internal device management strategy.

AI is helping us to simplify and improve the experience our employees have with their devices by predicting and auto-remediating issues, supporting proactive solutions, and enhancing the operating system’s look and feel.

As hybrid work becomes the norm—and the expectation—for our employees, how we in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, give them access to the tools they need to successfully innovate, create, and collaborate has evolved. Employees want a dynamic, device-agnostic experience that focuses on providing them with the data and tools that they need from almost any location, using a wide variety of devices, including PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

“We’re investing in AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting to reduce friction in device management,” says Daniel Manalo, a principal service engineer at Microsoft Digital. “We’re using AI and machine learning to help us schedule essential maintenance tasks and fix errors and performance issues autonomously.” “This is reducing downtime, prolonging device lifespans, and ensuring our employees have a consistent and productive experience by avoiding problems and errors.”

Manalo and his team are investigating ways to use AI to analyze device settings, network activity, vulnerabilities, and user behavior, enhanced with demographic data and location metadata to offer relevant solutions for common and emerging device problems.

While device management focuses on the employee experience, Manalo reminds us that Microsoft Digital support teams can benefit greatly as well.

“We want to help our support team be more productive through quicker decisions about device replacement, software updates, capacity increases, and other common support scenarios,” Manalo says.

Using AI to reduce friction in device management

Our employees use a wide variety of devices as their primary productivity tools to access their work and succeed in their roles. Our responsibility at Microsoft Digital is to ensure that each of our employees can be productive and connected to Microsoft tools and corporate data, regardless of the device they use.

There are more than 750,000 devices in use at Microsoft including Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux devices. Approximately 60% of these are Windows devices, while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45% are personally owned employee devices, including phones and tablets. Microsoft empowers employees to use the managed devices that enable them to be their most productive.

Microsoft Intune supports the modern management model at Microsoft. Intune provides cloud-based device management capabilities across Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux devices. Devices are registered in and authenticated by Microsoft Entra ID. Because it’s cloud-based, Intune removes the dependency on the local network, and managed devices can connect across the internet from anywhere. Modern management includes and supports both corporate and personally owned devices, including mobile devices.

However, even with the benefits of modern management, we recognize that there’s room for improvement.

Employee productivity and sentiment are directly affected when the condition of their device and the underlying infrastructure deteriorates. Unexpected reboots, application crashes, emerging vulnerabilities, and compatibility problems all negatively affect the employee experience. The situation is further aggravated by potentially long wait times with Helpdesk to resolve support tickets. And not all issues are reported by employees.

Our support teams spend large amounts of time manually pulling together data and insights to make long-term preventative decisions about device replacement, software upgrades, capacity increases, and more. They don’t have aggregated views with device health insights and the toolsets to analyze patterns and trends to reduce their decision-making time or increase their confidence that they made the right choices.

Put simply, we understand that our modern management processes have gaps, and we’re filling those gaps with AI-powered tools and services.

“The goal is to make the device smarter,” says Senthil Selvaraj, a principal product manager at Microsoft Digital. “We want the device—and the services that support it—to be intelligent and able to predict or detect issues on the device and self-remediate.”

Selvaraj’s team is focusing on using AI to provide detection and remediation in a way that prioritizes and respects the employee experience. “We don’t want our tools to consume a lot of local resources when the employee might need those resources for other tasks,” he says. 

Selvaraj says the focus is on creating a productive and frictionless device experience at all times. “We don’t want additional load on the device, so we want to make sure we’re running automated remediations at the right time without any impact to users,” he says.

Integrating AI for proactive maintenance and issue resolution

Disruptions in our enterprise device and infrastructure environment increase support costs and reduce employee productivity. When employees encounter an issue, they must stop whatever they’re doing and either fix the issue or report it to the IT helpdesk. Long resolution times for support tickets and lack of detailed insights for IT administrators further impact employee productivity and increase our support costs.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft, we’re developing and implementing AI-powered solutions that will simplify and improve the employee device experience.

“We’re developing an AI and automation solution that monitors, predicts, and resolves device and infrastructure issues for employees and IT admins,” says Dave Rodriguez, a principal product manager on the Frictionless Devices team in Microsoft Digital. “The solution uses data from our enterprise devices, such as laptops, network devices, sensors, and meeting room equipment to find and fix problems before they impact the users.”

The team is building capabilities that will actively solve IT challenges and lighten our employees’ cognitive load by proactively delivering solution-focused notifications and recommendations, while also addressing their queries about their device experiences.

“Using generative AI and natural language understanding, we’re providing IT administrators with a conversational AI experience,” says Pandurang Kamath Savagur, a senior program manager with Microsoft Digital. “This is enabling them to query patterns, observe analytics, and get recommendations across the device and infrastructure environment to manage and prevent disruptions.”

Specifically, our new solution provides an automated, AI-driven device experience by:

• Mining the vast telemetry that we capture across our devices and infrastructure to ground AI-based remediation and automation.
• Aggregating and collating the anomalies detected across devices and infrastructure to identify root causes of issues and impacted areas.
• Combining near real-time telemetry and historical anomalies and issues to predict and fix issues across the enterprise device landscape before they start negatively impacting employee productivity.
• Providing IT administrators with deep insights into the health and performance of enterprise devices by analyzing signals and demographic data to detect anomalies and proactively identify issues.
• Integrating with existing Microsoft products such as Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Teams that support and supply the employee device experience.

We’re excited to realize the potential of this solution for device support as we extend implementation and roll out to the larger device community at Microsoft.

Improving device security results with Microsoft Copilot for Security

Our security and IT teams are using Copilot for Security to protect at the speed and scale of AI, while remaining compliant to responsible AI principles.

Copilot for Security integrates directly with Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Intune, and many other security-relevant data sources to create a unified experience for large language model (LLM)-powered prompting, grounded in the data from integrated solutions.

We’re moving toward a holistic approach in which we enhance common use cases with Copilot for Security capabilities, including:

• Incident summarization. Copilot for Security is helping us gain context for incidents and improve communication across our organization by using generative AI to swiftly distill complex security alerts into concise, actionable summaries to enable quicker response times and streamlined decision-making.
• Impact analysis. Copilot for Security uses AI-driven analytics to assess the potential impact of security incidents, offering insights into affected systems and data to prioritize response efforts effectively.
• Reverse engineering of scripts. It helps us simplify malware investigation with automated reverse-engineering for scripts so every analyst can understand the actions executed by attackers. It also analyzes complex command-line scripts and translates them into natural language with clear explanations of actions.
• Guided response. We receive actionable step-by-step guidance for incident response, including directions for triage, investigation, containment, and remediation. Our support team also receives relevant deep links to recommended actions that allow for quicker response.

Copilot in Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot

Windows PCs are still the primary working environment for our employees. and are critical to our business. Copilot in Windows is an AI-powered assistant that’s built into the Windows operating system and uses advanced machine learning and natural language processing to provide intelligent suggestions, automate tasks, and integrate seamlessly with Microsoft services. 

Copilot in Windows brings Copilot to the taskbar, providing a natural language companion ready to assist our employees. It’s transforming how Microsoft employees work, allowing them to focus on strategic and creative tasks. 

Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot is at the core of our Copilot in Windows deployment at Microsoft Digital. 

“Microsoft 365 Copilot provides the most productive integration for our employees,” says Harshitha Digumarthi, a senior product manager at Microsoft Digital. 

Integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot with Copilot in Windows ensures adherence to enterprise security, governance, and trust standards. It also gives Microsoft employees a generative AI tool grounded in our enterprise data to get relevant, authoritative, and helpful answers and content directly from the Copilot in Windows interface.

Digumarthi’s team is also dedicated to understanding how updates influence user productivity and experience.

“We’re asking the important questions,” Digumarthi says. “How can Copilot in Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot enhance productivity? Will it introduce any changes that might lead to confusion?” 

Looking forward

We’re constantly examining new ways to use AI to extend our device management capabilities and are working toward integrating Copilot for Security more deeply into our device management and security practices. We’re also deploying our automated AI device management solution to a wider set of devices as we continue to refine existing features and develop new ones.

AI is making us rethink device management at Microsoft Digital. We’re using AI to enhance the user experience, predict and resolve issues, support proactive solutions, and improve security outcomes. This integration spans the entire device spectrum, from the employee experience to the services and tools that facilitate device management. We’re only just starting to uncover the possibilities in AI to simplify and improve device management and empower our employees to work from anywhere, on any device. We look forward to growing our device management capabilities alongside AI advancements in the future.

You can start your company’s path to AI-powered device management practices with the following key takeaways:

• Consider AI-supported tools. Explore how AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting can reduce friction and downtime in device management.
• Capture the power of generative AI. Use AI-driven analytics and generative AI to gain insights, recommendations, and guidance for device security and incident response.
• Implement Copilot in Windows. Use Copilot in Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot to access an AI-powered assistant that can provide intelligent suggestions, automate tasks, and integrate with Microsoft services.
• Learn and adapt. Learn from the Customer Zero experience of Microsoft Digital and how they’re using AI to enhance the device and user experience across different platforms and devices.

Here’s how to get started with Copilot in Windows. 

• Learn how modernization is helping us along on our internal device management journey.

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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 365, Viva enables our employees—and anyone who uses it—to hone their skills and acquire new ones. It gives our managers data-driven insights that help them make better decisions. Ultimately, Viva helps us—and organizations like yours—build inclusive, thriving cultures where people can achieve their full potential.

How does Viva work?

It centralizes resources to support the hybrid workplace, increasing employee engagement. Viva provides an integrated experience, using existing Microsoft 365 tools in an easily customizable and extensible platform that’s accessible from anywhere.

Our team, Microsoft Digital, in partnership with Microsoft Human Resources (HR) and our leadership, deployed Viva across Microsoft to accelerate our evolving growth-mindset culture and help ensure that our employees thrive.

Supporting employee engagement

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to power, protect, and transform Microsoft. Part of that responsibility is ensuring that Microsoft employees can thrive in a flexible hybrid work environment. Our team obsesses over every dimension of an employee’s experience, from early on when they are a candidate for employment to when they become an alumnus of the company. We steward employees’ digital experience through many dimensions, ensuring that they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure they need to be productive on the job, regardless of what they do or where they do it.

Improving employee experience with Viva requires a company-wide effort to build awareness and drive adoption. It’s an effort that’s both technical and cultural, driven by Microsoft HR in partnership with our team and the Viva product group.

Evolving our culture

To support our mission, Microsoft Digital works in close partnership with Microsoft HR to manage and support employee-related activities across the entire Microsoft organization. Microsoft HR is an important driver of organizational culture at Microsoft, helping our employees thrive in a growth mindset culture with a focus on being customer obsessed, diverse and inclusive, and unified as One Microsoft.

Microsoft leadership and the HR team collectively focus on embracing our company’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Technology can accelerate our culture and improve our employee experience. Our leaders and HR team sponsor and advocate for Viva as our internal experience platform.

Our Microsoft HR centers of excellence are groups of experts and leaders in areas such as culture, talent management, people analytics, learning and other people practices. They help drive cross-company HR programs and processes using evidence-based research and external benchmarks. Microsoft HR teams serve as experts in the employee life cycle, providing HR-related insights such as onboarding, wellbeing, recruiting, and career growth. This collective expertise was a key influence on Viva’s development and implementation.

From the start, Microsoft HR have been Viva advocates, looking for opportunities to streamline work using Viva for existing HR programs and processes and recommending new HR employee-experience scenarios that shape the future of Viva product design. As Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR deployed and implemented Viva internally, we found new opportunities for product features and improvements.

Adopting Viva as Customer Zero

At Microsoft, we are early adopters of our own technology. We believe in our products, and we obsess over making them better for our customers. This all happens within a culture and practice called Customer Zero.

Customer Zero is Microsoft’s journey to make our products better using our own business experience. Across our company, we respect employee privacy, data-access regulations, and the laws of the countries and regions where we operate while using powerful tools to understand how work gets done. By acting as Customer Zero for Viva, Microsoft Digital provides valuable employee feedback that enables the product team to develop features and experiences that further benefit not only Microsoft employees, but our global customers.

Throughout the Viva adoption process, the Customer Zero relationship includes the Viva product team as they develop new modules and features, using Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR as their first customers. Our role as Customer Zero extends beyond the scope of Microsoft’s business. While Microsoft is like many large, global enterprises, our Customer Zero leadership recognizes that there are a wide variety of business needs and corporate structures that Microsoft products must account for and support. Customer Zero includes data-centric research, common enterprise practices, and industry trends in tandem with internal Microsoft feedback to create the most accurate and comprehensive picture of enterprise needs.

Embracing Customer Zero practically

In practice, our Customer Zero approach requires involvement from all three contributors—Microsoft Digital, Microsoft HR, and the Viva product team. This involvement creates dependency among the three contributors for successful deployment, adoption, and testing. It also creates a cycle of benefits that positively affects all three contributors and, ultimately, Microsoft’s customers:

• Microsoft Digital. As the team responsible for implementing and supporting Viva within Microsoft, our team has direct access to the product group. This provides us with:
  • Access to preview features and capabilities at a controlled rollout schedule.
  • Direct support from the Viva product team for software updates and testing.
  • Support from Microsoft HR for driving cultural change and adoption and encouraging feedback from Microsoft employees.
• Microsoft HR. Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital technology teams have been partnering to drive Viva adoption to accelerate culture and business outcomes. This gives us:
  • The ability to guide feature development in Viva for specific use cases and scenarios within Microsoft.
  • The ability to contribute thought leadership in Viva’s product roadmap and overall design.
  • Assurance that the Viva product team is building a platform designed to meet business needs and evolve culture.
• Viva product group. The Viva product team has an in-place test and feedback environment, from both technical and cultural perspectives. Practically, the team receives:
  • Enterprise testing in real-life scenarios within the global Microsoft context. Our Microsoft Digital team conducts this testing.
  • Input from Microsoft subject matter experts in crucial Viva subject areas such as employee experience, HR processes, learning, and knowledge management.
  • Access to existing tools and capabilities across Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR tools that are already in place. We’ve developed a wide variety of apps and tools used for HR processes. The code and capabilities in these tools can be used in Viva modules and components.
  • Controlled feedback loop. As Customer Zero, Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR directly communicate with the product group.

Customer Zero is our way of improving our products and services before we release them to our customers, and it reflects our commitment to making Viva—and all our enterprise apps and services—the best they can be, based on our own internal usage at Microsoft.

Accelerating the employee experience with Viva

We’ve had great success driving usage and adoption of Viva across Microsoft through structured, globally relevant change-management activities. Enabling employees to thrive and be their best from anywhere by bringing knowledge, learning, resources, and insights together in the flow of work is always the central focus of our larger Viva adoption. At the same time, much of the practical implementation happened at the individual Viva module level, where each module supports culture evolution and employee experience at Microsoft.

Viva Topics

Viva Topics is helping us change our knowledge-management principle from knowledge is power to knowledge is empowering. Viva Topics provides information to our employees when and where they need it.  For example, our new employees must ingest a lot of information quickly, and they’ll encounter terms and acronyms unique to Microsoft. Viva Topics provides this type of information for users, in context. In the following figure, a Viva Topics card presents people, resources, and related topics based on a subject search.

Viva Topics uses AI to automatically search for and identify topics in our organization. It compiles information about the topics, such as a brief description, people working on the topic, and sites, files, and pages related to the topic. A knowledge manager or contributor can choose to update the topic information as needed, creating a partnership between human and AI–driven knowledge management. Topics are available to users, which means that for every instance of the topic that appears in a modern Microsoft SharePoint site in news and pages, the text will be highlighted. Users can choose to select the topic to learn more about it through the topic details. Topics can also be found in the flow of work in other Microsoft 365 applications, such as Microsoft Search, Bing, Outlook on the web, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams.

At Microsoft, Viva Topics is helping us unify our knowledge-management approach, consolidating many disconnected knowledge sources that account for more than nine petabytes of content into a central repository. We’re democratizing knowledge management through Viva Topics’ curation capabilities, and Microsoft Digital is empowering and encouraging volunteer knowledge managers and subject matter experts across the company to share their expertise with everyone.

Viva Insights

Viva Insights is designed to guide individuals and teams toward better work habits and norms to improve wellbeing and productivity. Viva Insights respects employee privacy while leveraging Microsoft 365 data to measure the day-to-day actions that contribute to our culture and success, like how employees use their time, their collaboration habits, and how they operate across team, business, and geographic boundaries.

Organizational insights help leaders understand how teams and groups are managing their work-life balance. At Microsoft, we use Viva Insights to promote a more productive workplace culture across all levels of the company using capabilities like Personal insights, Teamwork habits, and Organization trends:

Personal insights. Provides personal insights that only the employee can access. These insights help employees prioritize wellbeing with recommendations such as scheduling time for focused work, taking regular breaks, and practicing mindfulness.

Teamwork habits. Teamwork habits use team-level insights to help managers maintain regular 1:1 personal interaction and keep up with outstanding tasks to unblock the team and recognize strengths and accomplishments. They also help to establish team norms through shared plans that help build better work habits.

Organization trends. Provides insights that help managers and business leaders track leading indicators of employee wellbeing and engagement. These insights show how work culture is affecting organizational resiliency, including areas such as meeting effectiveness, overall employee wellbeing, and process efficiency.

By aggregating and evaluating this kind of data at the highest levels of the company, we’re able to use organizational trends to make changes that help us improve the employee experience.

Viva Learning

We’re using Viva Learning for high-value learning experiences, a part of which is creating a single front door for the wide variety of learning experiences available to Microsoft employees. Viva Learning is a centralized learning hub in Microsoft Teams that lets our employees seamlessly integrate learning and skill building into their day. With Viva Learning, our teams can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries provided by the organization and content recommended by peers. They can do all of this without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Viva Learning reduces learning-resource isolation, providing employees with a single portal to discover opportunities to build their skills or manage required training. Consolidating these experiences into a single environment, where learning can be discovered and shared within the flow of work, is a significant value of Viva Learning at Microsoft. AI-based content recommendations and peer-recommended learning enable our culture of learning, encouraging our employees to be full-time, lifelong learners in whatever areas they choose to pursue.

Viva Connections

Viva Connections is the gateway for our employees to connect with Microsoft culture and to stay engaged and informed. Viva Connections provides a branded app experience in Microsoft Teams, both mobile and desktop, to give our employees a personalized and curated destination to discover the relevant news, conversations, and tools they need to succeed.

Our employees interact with Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams. Connections creates the opportunity to present specific content and resources by combining information from Microsoft 365 apps such as SharePoint, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, and Teams.

We’re using the Viva Connections Dashboard to provide a curated experience using Adaptive Card Extensions that give employees access to their most critical content and tools. Cards are easily built and provide an extensibility mechanism that enables quick task completion directly in the card or by opening a quick view in the Dashboard.

Viva Connections is an excellent example of the power of our Customer Zero approach. Viva Connections was inspired by and based on Microsoft MyHub, an internal Microsoft employee mobile app built by our Microsoft Digital team that connects our employees to our corporate culture.

Viva Goals

Viva Goals is designed to help give employees a sense of purpose at work. A goal-setting and management solution, Viva Goals helps align our teams to our organizational strategic priorities, which helps us drive results.

When employees can align their daily work with a greater purpose, whether that’s tied to social good or the progress of their organization, they are more likely to find intrinsic value in their work. Because Viva Goals is a part of Microsoft Viva, it integrates into our employee experience, empowering employees and teams to be productive and feel inspired by their work.

At Microsoft, we’re using Viva Goals to define objectives and key results (OKRs) for our teams. We’re also using it to connect our employees’ daily work to broader business outcomes.

At Microsoft, we’ve achieved over 97 percent employee usage across Viva as a suite, and our adoption continues to grow. As we continue to drive additional usage, we’re continuously directing insights back to the Viva product team that help improve the experience for our customers. Based on our own usage and feedback from our customers and partners, we continue to help the product team build out new capabilities. These capabilities deliver additional value and help ensure that Viva is the centralized, digital platform to stay productive, connected, and supported in the hybrid workplace.

Our employee-experience evolution with Viva has been underway now for over two years, but we aren’t finished. We’re continuing to refine the capabilities of currently deployed modules and features based on our insights as Customer Zero. We’re committed to improving Viva for our customers and for our employees, and we look forward to sharing our future innovations with you.

• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn more about how we’re accelerating Microsoft’s digital transformation with Microsoft Viva Goals.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

Try using Microsoft Viva.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

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Fundamentally, employees and teams need to connect their jobs to the top organizational goals, be clear on their contribution, and align cross-functionally. Setting and shaping clear goals is essential for teams and individuals to understand their priorities and impact. According to the 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report, employees who report having clarity about their work priorities are almost 4 times as likely to stay at the company for more than two years. They’re also more than 7 times as likely to think less about looking for a new job and 4.5 times as likely to say they’re happy at their current company. However, the same research shows that only 13 percent of frontline managers clearly understood how their work contributed to the larger company strategy, and 72 percent of executives couldn’t name their company’s top three goals.

This gap between the pursuit of meaningful and clear sense of purpose and actual employee experiences needs to be repaired as the work environment becomes more complex, uncertain, rapidly changing, and demanding more with less. Employees need to feel energized and empowered to do meaningful work, which requires direct and clear connection with company goals and strategy, cross-functional alignment with peers and teams, and ability to deliver in an increasingly uncertain economic landscape.

[See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. Learn more about how we’re using OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals internally at Microsoft. Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. Learn how we’re fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning. Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.]

Aligning work and creating clarity with objectives and key results

At Microsoft, we’re using objectives and key results (OKRs) and Microsoft Viva Goals to align team priorities with business goals, helping to create a sense of purpose for our employees, clarify their impact, and connect priorities and achievements in all areas of our business.

OKRs align our entire organization to a common set of strategies, shifting focus to meaningful business outcomes and away from disconnected work priorities and outputs. OKRs enable our employees to focus on the projects and tasks that align to the objectives and key results that matter most to Microsoft and their teams, aligning their everyday work to the big picture of our business. This practice increases employee engagement, sharpens employees’ focus, and creates a shared understanding of how everyone is moving the company forward.

Microsoft Viva Goals provides a platform within which any organization’s employees and managers can use the OKR framework to set and execute goals while establishing clarity, purpose, and alignment. The OKR framework is supported by several components:

• Objectives are clear, inspiring, ambitious goals that define what teams or business groups want to accomplish. There are key questions to ask when establishing objectives: What is the most important area of our business to focus on? Why does that matter for us? How could we write that into a statement that inspires our team? Here’s an example of a good objective: “Deliver a ‘must-have’ product to delight customers and grow our user base.”
• Key results are the team or business group’s measurable outcomes. When establishing key results, ask the following questions. How will we know if we’re successful at achieving our objective? How can we measure the impact of our work? What is our best-case scenario for achieving that measure? Here’s an example of a relevant key result: “Increase our customer satisfaction score from 40 to 50.”
• Initiatives are activities that help the team achieve their key results. This is the work that teams do to execute on their OKRs. The following questions are helpful in determining the initiatives for an OKR: What do we need to do to be successful? What can we get done in this period? Who needs to be involved? Here’s a project that would contribute to the above key result: “Build a dashboard to track user experience in the new app.”

The OKR formula works like this:

Microsoft Viva Goals and the OKR framework is intended to get an entire organization, team, or groupings of employees focused and aligned on strategic priorities. OKRs support and integrate with project and task management solutions, they don’t replace them. OKRs measure business success, they’re not a measure of individual performance or a way to manage business-as-usual tasks. With Viva Goals, teams track aspirational goals that drive the business forward, not the day-to-day work of our employees.

OKRs help connect employees to the mission of an organization. Microsoft Viva Goals makes the OKR framework work in scalable and user-friendly ways. It accelerates the adoption of best practices for building and managing OKRs in one place with guidance and structure to support adoption. Viva Goals enables managers and employees to interact with their goals in the flow of work, surfacing and supporting the OKR framework in the tools they use everyday and enabling focus on what matters.

• Effective decision making: Microsoft Viva Goals provides our employees with a single source of truth so they can make swift, informed decisions. Importantly, they don’t need to manually track their progress when they get work done—Viva Goals automatically makes updates for them as they go.
• Be in the flow: Bringing our employees’ business goals and purpose into the flow of their work is simplifying adoption of our OKRs at scale without disrupting individual work.

Using Microsoft Viva Goals at Microsoft as Customer Zero

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small-and-midsized customers.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft Viva Goals, we have a unique opportunity to inform product development by aligning closely with product teams and internal stakeholders responsible for deployments, granting us the ability to address challenges other customers may experience through early and extensive feedback.

We want challenging but attainable goals at Microsoft—we don’t expect 100 percent of our objectives to be met. If that’s the case, our goals aren’t ambitious enough.

—Scott Blackwell, principal program manager, Microsoft Viva Goals

We collaborate closely with the Microsoft Viva product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of our Customer Zero partnership, Microsoft leaders and our implementation teams get early access to new features and a chance to steer the product roadmap in a direction that best meets real enterprise needs. Additionally, it sharpens our focus on skills and learning in the spirit of growth mindset and enables our own experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Viva Goals development process.

Our Customer Zero journey with Microsoft Viva Goals began before Viva Goals was a product. We’ve been using the OKR framework at Microsoft for two to three years and learned a lot along the way.

Scott Blackwell is Principal Program Manager for Viva Goals at Microsoft. He emphasizes the importance of practice in enabling successful implementation of OKRs and Viva Goals at Microsoft.

“Ultimately, using OKRs at Microsoft isn’t primarily about tooling. It’s more about the practice of goal-setting and what it means to implement OKRs into the mindset of our business,” Blackwell says. “It’s about how we set and drive those objectives and key results through leadership and communication. We want challenging but attainable goals at Microsoft—we don’t expect 100 percent of our objectives to be met. If that’s the case, our goals aren’t ambitious enough.”

To implement OKRs successfully, employee experience and culture need to be at the center. OKRs help accelerate culture change, in a simple and systematic way, employee by employee, organization by organization.

— Don Campbell, senior director, OKR Enterprise Accelerator team, Microsoft Viva Goals

Using OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals to remove roadblocks and help employees work more efficiently is what is driving the company’s success. The internal development of Viva Goals has also helped us improve our employee experience and has increased our employees’ engagement with Microsoft Viva. Our deep experience with OKRs as an organization has provided the Viva Goals development team with a customer that can provide feedback, inform the development process, and help to create a product that supports the OKR framework with an engaging experience for both employees and leadership.

Driving adoption with employee focus and key roles

Our adoption of Microsoft Viva Goals at Microsoft is driven by our culture. Having our executives and leadership teams sponsor and promote OKRs within their business groups was as important—if not more important—than technically implementing the toolset. OKRs are, at their core, outcomes and productivity drivers that impact every employee, aligning each of them to the purpose of the organization.

Don Campbell is the Senior Director of the Microsoft Viva Goals OKR Enterprise Accelerator (OEA) team. “To implement OKRs successfully, employee experience and culture need to be at the center,” Campbell says. “OKRs help accelerate culture change, in a simple and systematic way, employee by employee, organization by organization.”

It’s about helping your employees stay focused on your strategy and vision.

“OKRs underpin the direction and purpose of the organization,” he adds. “It’s not just what you do, but why you do it, and how. If someone comes to me with an idea for some line of work or project, I’m immediately going to ask how it’s aligned to the key results we have in place. I’ll ask questions about the outcome, the timing, whether it’s the right thing. These lead to conversations that enhance clarity and ensure alignment across anything we do.”

Establishing team roles and identifying the people and teams that can accelerate adoption is at the focus of our internal plans for OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals. A shift to greater clarity and better alignment must happen across the organization. We’ve identified several important roles in the adoption process that any company should incorporate into their plans for Viva Goals and OKRs:

• The executive sponsor has a clear vision for OKRs and the benefits of the framework. They work to communicate with leadership and ensure that company leaders have the guidance and encouragement to enable OKRs for their teams and embed a goal-setting culture across the organization.
• OKR champions facilitate the OKR process. They are the OKR experts, acting as a resource for OKR information, answering questions about OKR adoption, and encouraging adoption.
• Team managers are at the forefront of helping employees to achieve their business outcomes in the context of objectives and key results. Team managers have a deep understanding of their team’s OKR and maintain OKR focus across the projects that team members are working on.
• Human resources (HR) leaders support company-wide adoption and alignment to accelerate company culture and employee experience. They also supply access to learning and development planning resources, consistent adoption messaging, and they support team leaders in the practical implementation of the OKR framework.
• Admin and IT teams implement the technology necessary to put Microsoft Viva Goals and the OKR framework in front of every employee in the organization. Meeting employees in the flow of work and creating an engaging employee experience.

Implementing OKRs with Microsoft Viva Goals

Rajesh Jha is Executive Vice President of Experiences and Devices at Microsoft. His team is responsible for building many Microsoft products, including Windows, Microsoft 365, Edge, and Bing. The Experiences + Devices team recently adopted Microsoft Viva Goals for OKRs management as an organization, with Jha’s executive sponsorship leading the way.

The 40,000 global employees on the Experiences and Devices team journeyed through a 12-week adoption of Microsoft Viva Goals, coming from a variety of OKR maturity levels and solutions. Like much of Microsoft, OKRs were not new to Jha and his team, but having Viva Goals available as a universal tool to manage OKRs across the entire organization was.

The OKR Enterprise Accelerator (OEA) team at Microsoft led and managed the Experiences + Devices implementation. They identified the key roles to be filled to support Microsoft Viva Goals rollout, including Jha as the executive sponsor. Internal communications and leadership teams from Experiences and Devices provided leadership and communications to employees, while Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital provided HR and IT support. The enterprise accelerator team provided the initial OKR champions, but also developed local OKR champions within the Enterprise and Devices organization.

The OEA team established a workback schedule and implementation timeline according to the maturity levels and implementation needs of the teams across the department. The extended Experiences + Devices leadership team signed off on the project and messaging plan and the OEA team began a 4-week sprint with OKR champions to get all OKRs established and set in Microsoft Viva Goals across leadership and team managers.

After the initial sprint, leadership and team managers engaged with their employees—more than 40,000 of them—to adopt Microsoft Viva Goals for OKR management. This meant establishing ongoing rhythms, ensuring that Viva Goals in Microsoft Teams was available to and used by employees. From there, they aligned key results and projects with their employees and teams. Some of the most important activities in our rollout to Experiences and Devices team included:

• Defining the criteria for success. We had to establish OKRs to guide our OKR rollout! These OKRs helped define what success meant and focused us on what we wanted to accomplish.
• Establishing program guidance documentation. We drafted a set of resources that provided Q and A style information to answer typical questions and provide a common base for understanding. This documentation was available to all employees.
• Holding weekly community meetings. These meetings informally brought our OKR champions together and helped build connections and best practices that were shared across the team.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft Viva Goals, we’ve learned and grown along our journey with OKRs at Microsoft. In our environment, we’re currently using Viva Goals to manage almost 9,000 objectives, more than 21,000 key results, and approximately 4,000 projects.

Our relationship with the Viva Goals product team as Customer Zero has resulted in more than 160 design and feature change suggestions, removal of more than 140 bugs, and almost 2,000 teams at Microsoft using Viva Goals.

What’s Next

Our journey with Microsoft Viva Goals is ongoing. We’re working towards large-scale adoption of Microsoft Viva Goals in the current fiscal year and, subsequently, broader adoption of the OKR practice at Microsoft. We strongly believe it will increase employee engagement, clarity of goals and impact, sense of meaningful work, and feeling a part of achieving our collective purpose.

The success of our implementation with Experiences and Devices and many other large Microsoft organizations is the beginning of building a broader awareness of the OKR framework and Microsoft Viva Goals at Microsoft. Our OEA team continues to guide Viva Goals adoption throughout the wider Microsoft organization.

We’ve established several must haves for a successful Microsoft Viva Goals rollout.

• You should Identify a committed executive sponsor. Make sure you have enthusiastic leaders accountable for the success of the overall program—not just within individual teams.
• Build a public timeline linked with key planning milestones. Hold your team accountable and create a valuable sense of urgency.
• Build a network of local OKR champions to evangelize the change and provide avenues for average employees to get reactive support while maintaining strong ownership by team leaders.
• Communicate clear expectations and create community. Ensure expectations and asks are clear and concise at all points throughout the process.

The OKR framework and Microsoft Viva Goals is providing real business benefit at Microsoft and to Microsoft customers. Some of our most significant benefits from using Viva Goals include:

• Better alignment. Knowledge sharing and cross-functional visibility highlight collaboration opportunities so teams can identify joint priorities and pull resources together.
• Greater focus. Leaders have a heightened sense of clarity and accountability, and they can relay this to employees at company wide meetings to reinforce focus areas.
• More transparency. Microsoft Viva Goals provides a single source of truth for goals and how daily work contributes. Leaders understand how they are tracking towards goals without having to track down data. Employees understand how the projects they are working on impact team and company goals.
• Increased agility. Healthy business rhythms emerge around goals. Weekly meeting around progress towards OKRs aligns teams on the types of opportunities to target and helps continually refocus team actions on what’s most important, even when what’s most important changes.
• Elevated achievement. The entire organization builds a portfolio of accomplishment and a culture of celebration. The company no longer talks about activities and tasks, but instead celebrates impact within existing celebratory patterns.

• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn more about how we’re using OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals internally at Microsoft.
• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

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The post Powering purpose-driven employee engagement and driving efficiency internally at Microsoft with OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Our migration from managing our own datacenters to Microsoft Azure has been a process of learning and growing. We’ve moved more than 600 services and solutions comprised of approximately 1,400 components to Azure-based cloud technologies that require less specialized skill sets to use and provide quicker, more agile access to infrastructure and solutions.

We’re the Microsoft Digital (MSD) team and we have led the company’s move from the datacenter to the cloud, enabling best-in-class platforms and productivity services for the mobile-first, cloud-first world. This strategy harmonizes the interests of our employee users of our services, our developers, and our team of IT implementers who provide the core of our IT operations.

The freedom to provision resources in minutes instead of days has radically changed the way we in MSD enable teams across the company to spin up the environments and resources they need on demand, which in turn empowers our engineering teams to respond more quickly to our evolving business needs.

However, we’ve found that easy provisioning and quick deployments can be costly. An unmanaged or undermanaged enterprise estate in Microsoft Azure can quickly lead to significant cloud billing costs and under-utilized resources. But in our journey to the cloud, we’ve learned that there are many smart ways to optimize how you use the cloud, tricks of the trade that we’re using to keep our costs down while we transform the way we work. In this blog post, we’ll share the lessons we’ve learned here at Microsoft on how you can fine-tune your use of Microsoft Azure at your company.

[Read our related blog post on our lessons learned deploying and optimizing Microsoft Azure internally at Microsoft. | Learn how we’re implementing Microsoft Azure cost optimization internally at Microsoft. | Read more about turning to DevOps engineering practices to democratize access to data at Microsoft. | Explore how Microsoft uses a scream test to silence its unused servers.]

Watch to learn how optimizing our Microsoft Azure workloads is helping Microsoft operate more efficiently.

Adopting modern engineering practices

Modern engineering practices underpin everything we do in Microsoft Azure, from single resource deployments to enterprise-scale, globally distributed Azure-based solutions that span hundreds of resources. Our modern engineering vision has created culture, tools, and practices focused on developing high-quality, secure, and feature-rich services to enable digital transformation across the organization.

Our operations and engineering teams have journeyed through several phases of efficiency maturity. Through each of these phases, our operations substructure had to evolve, and many of those changes resulted in increased efficiency, not just with the bottom line on our monthly Azure bill, but with the way we do service management in Azure, including development, deployment, change management, monitoring, and incident management.

—Pete Apple, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure engineering, MSD

Pete Apple is a Principal Program Manager for Microsoft Azure Engineering in MSD. He and his team have been responsible for overseeing and implementing our massive migration to the cloud over the past 8 years. They’re also responsible for ensuring that the company’s enterprise estate in Microsoft Azure is running at top efficiency.

“Our operations and engineering teams have journeyed through several phases of efficiency maturity,” Apple says. “Through each of these phases, our operations substructure had to evolve, and many of those changes resulted in increased efficiency, not just with the bottom line on our monthly Azure bill, but with the way we do service management in Azure, including development, deployment, change management, monitoring, and incident management.”

We went through three phases on our journey to greater efficiency in Microsoft Azure. Phase one focused on improving operational efficiency, phase two examined how we could deliver value through innovation, and in phase three we embraced transforming our digital ecosystem. Here’s a summary of the three phases:

Improving operational efficiency

At MSD, we play a pivotal role in Microsoft business strategy, as most business processes in the company depend on us. To help Microsoft transform on our journey to the cloud, we identified key focus areas to improve in this first phase of our transformation: aligning services, optimizing infrastructure, and assessing our culture.

The first phase involved culture and structure as much as it did strategy and platform management. We realigned our organization to better support a brand-new way of providing services and support to the company in Microsoft Azure. Our teams needed to realign to eliminate information silos between different support areas. In many cases, teams that started to work together realized they had duplicate projects with similar goals.

Reducing projects and streamlining delivery methods freed up engineering resources to accomplish more in less time, while automated provisioning and self-service tools helped our teams plan their own migrations and accurately assess their portion of our Microsoft Azure estate.

Our engineering culture underwent a radical change in phase one. We moved toward empowering our engineers to create business solutions, not just create and manage processes. This led to a more holistic view of what we were trying to accomplish—as individuals and as teams—and it increased innovation, creativity, and productivity throughout our engineering processes.

Delivering value through innovation

We migrated more than 90 percent of our IT infrastructure to Microsoft Azure in phase one. In phase two, we embraced the Azure platform and cloud-native engineering design principles by adopting Infrastructure as Code and continuous deployment. We redefined operations roles and retrained people from traditional IT roles to be business relationship managers, engineering program managers, service engineers, and software engineers.

We also radically simplified our IT operations. The rapid provisioning and allocation process in Microsoft Azure enabled us to increase our speed 40-fold by eliminating, streamlining, and connecting processes, and by aligning processes for Azure. Azure native solutions, especially platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings were adopted across all aspects of the engineering and operations lifecycle. These included infrastructure as code with ARM templates, APIs, and PowerShell.

This final phase is never really final. Continual evaluation and optimization of our Microsoft Azure environment is built into how we manage our resources in the cloud. As new features and engineering approaches arise, we’re adapting our methods and best practices to get the most from our investment.

—Heather Pfluger, general manager, Infrastructure and Engineering Services, MSD

Solutions that were lifted-and shifted into Microsoft Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) resources are regularly reassessed for migration or refactoring into PaaS offerings. We also adopted Microsoft Azure Monitor for consolidated monitoring not only for our Azure resources, but also on-premises resources.

Embracing the digital ecosystem

Our final phase is focusing on developing intelligent systems on Microsoft Azure to deliver reliable, scalable services and to connect operations processes across Microsoft. Automation has been built more deeply into our support and development processes by embracing a DevOps culture and open-source standards in our solutions.

Together, Microsoft Azure PaaS offerings and Microsoft Azure DevOps enable our engineers to focus on features and usability, while the ARM fabric and Microsoft Azure Monitor provide unified management to provision, manage, and decommission infrastructure resources securely.

“This final phase is never really final,” says Heather Pfluger, the general manager of Infrastructure and Engineering Services in MSD who manages Microsoft’s internal Microsoft Azure profile. “Continual evaluation and optimization of our Microsoft Azure environment is built into how we manage our resources in the cloud. As new features and engineering approaches arise, we’re adapting our methods and best practices to get the most from our investment.”

Gaining efficiency from past experience

Apple, who works on Pfluger’s team, adds that customers’ migrations can benefit from taking a shortcut that Microsoft didn’t take.

“As early adopters, our migration practices were pushing the toolsets available,” he says. “When we looked at our on-premises environment and what was available in Azure, it made sense to move a significant portion of our solutions directly into IaaS resources.”

Apple talks about the tradeoffs made between agility and efficiency.

There are much better tools and best practices in-place now to migrate on-premises solutions directly into PaaS resources, eliminating the need to lift-and-shift and saving the cost of creating and maintaining those IaaS resources.

—Pete Apple, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure engineering, MSD

“These solutions were being lifted from the datacenter and shifted straight into Azure Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, and Storage Accounts,” he says. “This allowed us to recreate the on-premises environment in the cloud so we could get it out of the datacenter quickly, but it still left us with some of the maintenance tasks and costs inherent with IaaS infrastructure and room for further optimization with PaaS-based solutions.”

After the lift-and-shift migration, Apple’s teams re-engineering and re-platformed the IaaS solutions to use PaaS solutions such as Microsoft Azure SQL Database and Microsoft Azure Web Apps. Apple explains the shortcut, “There are much better tools and best practices in-place now to migrate on-premises solutions directly into PaaS resources, eliminating the need to lift-and-shift and saving the cost of creating and maintaining those IaaS resources.”

Managing data and resource sprawl with agility

We’re also undergoing specific efforts across our Microsoft Azure estate to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Azure infrastructure supports the entire Microsoft cloud, including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. While most of these offerings do not allow for direct resource optimization, understanding the fundamentals of cloud scaling and billing is a critical aspect of using them efficiently. Data sprawl is a constant consideration for us.

Dan Babb is the Principal Software Engineering Manager responsible for MSD’s implementation of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics for big data ingestion, migration, and exploration. It’s a massive data footprint, with more than 1 billion read operations and 10 petabytes of data consumed monthly through Apache Spark clusters.

Small specifics with Spark clusters can make a big difference.

“Each job that comes through Azure Synapse Analytics is run on a Spark cluster for compute services,” Babb says. “There’s a large selection of compute sizes available. The largest ones process data the quickest, but, naturally, they’re also the most expensive. We all like things to be done quickly, so many of our engineers were using very large compute sizes because they’re fast.”

Babb clarifies that just because you can use the fastest method doesn’t mean you should.

“Many of our jobs aren’t crucially time-sensitive, so we stopped using the bigger cluster sizes because we didn’t need to,” he says.

Babb emphasizes that accurately assessing the workload and priority of each job has significantly reduced costs.

“Processing a workload on a smaller instance for 20 minutes instead of using a larger instance for 5 minutes has resulted in significant cost savings for us,” he says. “We’re monitoring our subscriptions and if a really big cluster size gets spun up, an Azure Monitor Alert notifies our engineering leads they can follow up to ensure that the cluster size is appropriate for the job it’s running.”

Apple says this is a way of cost cutting that is being widely adopted across our organization.

“Our business program managers are realizing that they can save money by slowing down projects that don’t need to be rushed,” he says. “For example, we had some folks in Finance who realized that some of their batch reporting didn’t really need to be out in one hour, it was fine if it took eight hours because they only had to run their reports once per day.”

Babb’s team is also designing for distributed processing, creating solutions that are dispersed across clusters and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics workspaces to create distributed platform architecture that is more flexible and less prone to a single point of failure.

“If we run into an issue with a component or workspace and we have to take it down, it doesn’t affect the entire solution, just the single cluster or workspace and the job it was running,” he says.

Using multiple workspaces and clusters has also made it much easier to get granular reporting and cost estimation. Babb’s team members are using monitoring and reporting that enable them to understand the exact cost for any specific job, from ingestion to storage to report generation.

Designing for Zero Trust

The Zero Trust security model is pervasive across our Microsoft Azure environment. Based on the principle of verified trust—to trust, you must first verify—Zero Trust eliminates the inherent trust that is assumed inside the traditional corporate network. Zero Trust architecture reduces risk across all environments by establishing strong identity verification, validating device compliance prior to granting access, and ensuring least privilege access to only explicitly authorized resources.

The Zero Trust model assumes every request is a potential breach. As such, every request that travels through our Microsoft Azure or on-premises environments must be verified as though it originates from an open network. Regardless of where the request originates or what resource it accesses, Zero Trust teaches us to “never trust, always verify.” Every access request is fully authenticated, authorized, and encrypted before granting access. Micro-segmentation and least privileged access principles are applied to minimize lateral movement. Rich intelligence and analytics are used to detect and respond to anomalies in real time.

Throughout the Zero Trust model in Microsoft Azure, opportunities exist for simplification and increased efficiency. Microsoft Azure Entra ID allows us to centralize our identity and access workload, which simplifies identification and authorization across the hybrid cloud. Azure’s flexible network infrastructure allows us to implement complex and agile micro-segmentation scenarios in minutes with Microsoft Azure Bicep Templates, and Microsoft Azure Virtual Networks. Our engineers are creating connectivity scenarios and solutions that were simply unimaginable using traditional networking practices.

Mei Lau is a Principal Program Manager for Security Monitoring Engineering. Her team’s job is to ensure that across the increasingly complex and dynamic Microsoft Azure networking environment, Zero Trust principles are adhered to and Microsoft’s network environment remains safe and secure.

Her team is using Microsoft Sentinel to deliver intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise at Microsoft. Sentinel allows her security experts to detect attacks and hunt for threats across millions of network signals.

Real-time detection data is more expensive than some of the other data storage options we have. As convenient as it would be to have it all, it’s not that critical. We move our older data into Azure Data Explorer where it’s less expensive to store, but still allows us to use Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries just like we would in Sentinel.

—Mei Lau, principal program manager, Security Monitoring Engineering, Microsoft Digital Security and Resilience

With that much traffic to collect and examine, Lau notes that cost in Sentinel comes down to one primary factor: data ingestion.

“We want our investigation scope to be as detailed as possible, so naturally, the inclination is to keep all the data we can,” she says.

The reality of the situation is that you need to be careful to keep your costs down.

“Real-time detection data is more expensive than some of the other data storage options we have,” Lau says. “As convenient as it would be to have it all, it’s not that critical. We move our older data into Azure Data Explorer where it’s less expensive to store, but still allows us to use Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries just like we would in Sentinel.”

In Microsoft Sentinel, threat detections result in stored data, so Lau and her team are also diligent about the accuracy and usefulness of the more than 200 detection rules that are configured in Sentinel.

“We’re continually monitoring and managing detections that fire false positives,” she says. “We generally want at least 80 percent fidelity for a healthy detection. If we don’t achieve that, we either refine the detection or remove it.”

Our governance model provides centralized control and coordination for all cost-optimization efforts. Getting this right is pivotal for any organization looking to get the most out of being on the cloud in Azure.

—Pete Apple, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure engineering, MSD

Lau’s team proactively monitors data storage in Microsoft Sentinel to look for sudden spikes in usage or other indicators that data usage practices might need to be assessed. It all contributes to a more efficient and streamlined threat management system that does its job well and doesn’t break the bank.

Observing results and managing governance

To ensure effective identification and implementation of recommendations, governance in cost optimization is critical for our applications and the Microsoft Azure services that those applications use.

“Our governance model provides centralized control and coordination for all cost-optimization efforts,” Apple says. “Getting this right is pivotal for any organization looking to get the most out of being on the cloud in Azure.”

Our model consists of several important components, including:

• Microsoft Azure Advisor recommendations and automation. Advisor cost management recommendations serve as the basis for our optimization efforts. We channel Advisor recommendations into our IT service management and Microsoft Azure DevOps environment to better track how we implement recommendations and ensure effective optimization.
• Tailored cost insights. We’ve developed dashboards to identify the costliest applications and business groups and identify opportunities for optimization. The data that these dashboards provide empower engineering leaders to observe and track important Microsoft Azure cost components in their service hierarchy to ensure that optimization is effective.
• Improved Microsoft Azure budget management. We perform our Azure budget planning by using a bottom-up approach that involves our finance and engineering teams. Open communication and transparency in planning are important, and we track forecasts for the year alongside actual spending to date to enable accurate adjustments to spending estimates and closely track our budget targets. Relevant and easily accessible spending data helps us identify trend-based anomalies to control unintentional spending that can happen when resources are scaled or allocated unnecessarily in complex environments.

Implementing a governance solution has enabled us to realize considerable savings by making a simple change to Microsoft Azure resources across our entire footprint. For example, we implemented a recommendation to convert Microsoft Azure SQL Database instances from the Standard database transaction unit (DTU) based tier to a serverless tier by using a simple Microsoft Azure Resource Manager template and the auto-pause capability. The configuration change reduced costs by 97 percent.

Moving forward

As we continue our journey, we’re focusing on refining our efforts and identifying new opportunities for further cost optimization in Microsoft Azure.

Our MSD Azure footprint will continue to grow in the years ahead, and our cost-optimization and efficiency efforts will grow to ensure that we’re making the most of our Azure investment.

—Heather Pfluger, general manager, Infrastructure and Engineering Services, MSD

“There’s still a lot we can do here,” Pfluger says. “We’re building and increasing monitoring measures that help us ensure we’re using the optimal Azure services for our solutions. We’re infusing automated scalability into every element of our Azure environment and reducing our investment in the IaaS components that currently support some of our legacy technologies.”

Microsoft Azure optimization is always ongoing.

“Our MSD Azure footprint will continue to grow in the years ahead, and our cost-optimization and efficiency efforts will grow to ensure that we’re making the most of our Azure investment,” Pfluger says.

• Embrace modern engineering practices. Adopting modern engineering practices that support reliability, security, operational excellence, and performance efficiency will help to enable better cost optimization in Microsoft Azure. Staying aware of new Azure services and changes to existing functionality will also help you recognize cost-optimization opportunities as soon as possible.
• Use data to drive results. Accurate and current data is the basis for making timely optimization decisions that provide the largest cost savings possible and prevent unnecessary spending. Using optimization-relevant metrics and monitoring from Microsoft Azure Monitor is critical to fully understanding the necessity and impact of optimization across services and business groups.
• Use proactive cost-management practices. Using real-time data and proactive cost-management practices can get you from recommendation to implementation as quickly as possible while maintaining governance over the process.
• Implement central governance with local accountability. Auditing Microsoft Azure cost-optimization efforts to help improve Azure budget-management processes will identify gaps in cost management methods.

• Read our related blog post on our lessons learned deploying and optimizing Microsoft Azure internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re implementing Microsoft Azure cost optimization internally at Microsoft.
• Read more about turning to DevOps engineering practices to democratize access to data at Microsoft.
• Explore how Microsoft uses a scream test to silence its unused servers.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Doing more with less internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Growing knowledge management at Microsoft

Like many large, global organizations, Microsoft has a wealth of information available to our employees that spans every aspect of our business, how it works, and how we can work together to make in better. We host more than 10 petabytes of uncategorized content and data in search that spans more than 353 million search items. Prior to Microsoft Viva Topics, less than 1 percent of those search items were actively classified and organized.

Historically, information content has been difficult to manage at Microsoft, as it is for many organizations our size. Content was isolated, potentially duplicated, and not universally curated. In many cases, our employees had to search out their own path to find the content they need.

We wanted to grow our knowledge management capabilities to better anticipate employee knowledge needs and put knowledge into our employees’ hands, in context, when and where they needed it. We needed better methods to disseminate knowledge content to support a knowledge sharing culture that fosters the broader culture of learning at Microsoft.

[See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. | Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. | Learn how we’re fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Learning.]

Creating a vision for Microsoft Viva Topics

Microsoft Viva Topics turns content into usable knowledge. AI capabilities enable us to survey our organization’s content and automatically identify, process, and organize it into easily accessible knowledge. We can organize knowledge and enable experts across the organization to share and refine knowledge through curated topic pages, automatically generated and updated by AI. Viva Topics makes it easy to discover and use knowledge in context through relevant topic cards in the apps our employees use every day.

Leading in adoption as Customer Zero

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are our own “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small-and-midsized customers.

As part of Customer Zero for Microsoft Viva Topics, our Microsoft Digital team has a unique opportunity to inform product development by aligning closely with product teams and internal stakeholders responsible for deployments, granting us the ability to address challenges other customers may experience through early and extensive feedback.

We collaborate closely with the Viva product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of the Customer Zero partnership, Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital teams get early access to new features and a chance to steer the product roadmap in a direction that best meets real enterprise knowledge management needs. This enables our own experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Microsoft Viva Topics development process and help grow Viva Topics into a single knowledge management platform for the entire organization and Microsoft customers.

Configuring Microsoft Viva Topics for the enterprise

Topic identification forms the basis of knowledge management and content consolidation in Microsoft Viva Topics. AI and Microsoft Graph are used to identify knowledge and people and automatically organize them into topics. We ran topics identification across our entire SharePoint Online tenant, except data classified as highly confidential or non-business. We’ve used an established taxonomy service at Microsoft to govern knowledge classification and dissemination. By seeding topics from this taxonomy service, we were able to better inform the AI about the kind of knowledge we wanted to keep in the organization. This increased the efficiency of the subsequent topic curation.

Topic curation enables our experts to refine and add topics identified by the identification process. After initial topic identification, we had a small team curate existing topics and begin the process of engaging our experts in becoming knowledge managers for Microsoft Viva Topics. Engaging knowledge managers and onboarding them to topic curation was essential to a relevant and dynamic knowledge repository in Viva Topics.

Our topic curators operate primarily in two areas: Either as knowledge managers for authoritative or regulated content, or as collaborative topic contributors for the remainder—and majority—of our knowledge content. We’re continually refining our processes for gathering and establishing topic curators. Onboarding active topic curators is the primary goal, but we also want to build our topic curators into advocates for their topic area and influencers in the organization for Microsoft Viva Topics. Our curators are discovering that Viva Topics makes their knowledge more discoverable across the organization and provides an easy-to-use experience for curation. It also offers a single location for everything related to their topic, transfers their personal knowledge into a reusable topic resource, and inspires knowledge sharing and new ideas.

We provide resources for any employee at Microsoft to promote their topic within Microsoft Viva Topics. These resources include Yammer and Teams post suggestions, digital signage, topic curator success stories, slide decks, and videos. It’s all designed to build our community of topic curators.

We’re experimenting with motivating our employees to contribute through email and Teams, contacting contributors that have made edits or left an incomplete draft and inviting them to come back and continue making changes.

—Rene Sanchez Almaguer, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

We’re also using several methods outside of Microsoft Viva Topics to identify potential topic curators. We’ve integrated our internal search to track knowledge sources across the organization and who is creating and contributing those resources. SharePoint portal owner information can point us to authoritative sources for information across portal sites that provide information such as user guides, corporate guidance, compliance regulations, or specific instructions for an application or business process.

We crowdsource most knowledge management in Microsoft Viva Topics, aside from authoritative HR and legal topics. Anyone can see a topic and edit a topic. We’ve partnered with Microsoft HR to offer learning experiences and guidance for topic curation to make it as easy as possible to begin contributing to a topic.

“We’re experimenting with motivating our employees to contribute through email and Teams, contacting contributors that have made edits or left an incomplete draft and inviting them to come back and continue making changes,” says Rene Sanchez Almaguer, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital who is heading up a team responsible for engaging topic curators for Microsoft Viva Topics.

Continuing to encourage contributors and reminding of the benefits of Viva Topics is growing the community of topic curators at Microsoft. Almaguer adds, “We’ve also been recognizing contributors through Microsoft Viva Insights; sending praise to top contributors and giving them kudos through that tool, saying, ‘Hey, the 30 topics that you curated last month have contributed to this number of impressions or views. So just keep going and keep helping others in the company find information.’”

Putting information in the hands of our employees

We’ve progressed through multiple phases of Viva Topics deployment. In Phase 1, we limited topic contribution to a small team of dedicated topic curators that helped curate the initial set of topics that the topic identification AI identified and created. We limited discovery endpoints to SharePoint and our internal search. In phase 2, we introduced crowdsourcing for topic curation, along with the ability to suggest new topics. In our final phase, we expanded discovery endpoints to include Outlook on the web, Yammer, Bing, and Teams.

Topic discovery endpoints enable our employees to discover the knowledge they need in the context of the app they’re using. Our currently deployed discovery contexts include:

• SharePoint modern pages. Topics are automatically suggested in SharePoint modern pages as highlights. Employees can hover over the highlighted text, display a topic card, and discover information. Site owners can manually add topics into their pages by typing # and selecting the desired topic.
• Yammer topics. Topics in Yammer have now become Viva Topics. Employees can continue adding a topic to their Yammer post or question. These Yammer conversations are aggregated and displayed inside topic pages, respecting privacy and permissions settings.
• Search. We’re surfacing topics across Microsoft search in Microsoft SharePoint, Bing, Microsoft Office apps, and Office.com, using topic answers, a topic card that is showcased within search results, pointing employees to most relevant topics related to their search queries.
• Teams chats. Employees can reference Microsoft Viva Topics inside Microsoft Teams chats for sharing knowledge quickly by typing # and selecting the desired topic. Soon, this functionality will be available in Teams channels.
• Profile cards. Within Microsoft 365, we’re connecting topics to people and people to topics by showcasing an employee’s involvement with specific topics on the profile cards for employees that pop up across Microsoft 365 apps and interfaces.
• Email. Microsoft Outlook on the web shows our employees topics that are relevant to any email thread they have in focus. It enables them to establish context for email conversations directly from Outlook on the web, and soon, the Outlook desktop app.

Driving change management and governance

We’re using Viva Topics to help employees get information from both collaborative and authoritative sources. We’re managing this convergence of knowledge in ways that ensure we set appropriate standards for how AI content creation and human curation coexist.

We prioritize applying our standards to existing content ahead of creating new content. We’re focusing on refining and consolidating existing knowledge in Microsoft Viva Topics to reduce topic duplication and unnecessary effort involved in creating duplicate topics. We’re also standardizing how Viva Topics integrates with other components of the Viva suite such as Viva Connections and Viva Engage.

Examining the current state of Viva Topics at Microsoft

Microsoft Viva Topics is currently in full deployment at Microsoft, with almost 90,000 AI suggested topics available and more than 2,500 of those topics managed by human topic curators. As Customer Zero, we’ve worked with the Viva Topics product team to introduce several features and improvements to Viva Topics throughout our implementation.

Evaluating and sharing user feedback from our 140,000-employee user base helped identify gaps or strengths in product functionality and helped the product team with compliance reviews. Our internal knowledge management experts at Microsoft Digital, along with HR, Legal, and Privacy teams helped the product group shape guiding principles for topic identification and knowledge management policies built into Viva Topics.

Our internal taxonomy definitions helped define Microsoft Viva Topics internal taxonomies and the product group leveraged telemetry from popular internal searches to help identify valid topics to curate with the built-in AI. We’ve also created a library of reusable material such as videos, slide decks, animated GIFs, and Yammer and Teams post templates that other Viva Topics customers can use to champion Viva Topics.

Though Microsoft Viva Topics is fully deployed at Microsoft, we’re far from done. We’re working on expanding topics into new endpoints across Microsoft 365 to make our employees more productive by bringing the knowledge across Microsoft 365 productivity tools. Our ongoing efforts to promote crowdsourcing culture at Microsoft will continue to grow our community of topic curators and propel the knowledge culture forward at Microsoft. We’re identifying search session results, especially failed searches, to generate new topics where information isn’t already available in Viva Topics.

We understand that content from authoritative sources, such as sites curated and published by internal groups like human resources, legal, and facilities, need to coexist with AI generated and crowdsourced content. We are exploring ways to improve curation and management experiences of authoritative content.

Across all these efforts, we’re measuring satisfaction and success to determine where we’re succeeding—and failing—to engage our employees in a knowledge sharing culture at Microsoft. As we continue, we know that Viva Topics will be a critical factor in growing knowledge sharing at Microsoft where every employee feels valued for their contribution to the larger culture of learning and growth that defines Microsoft.

• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

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The post Fueling Microsoft’s knowledge sharing culture with Microsoft Viva Topics appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Safeguarding corporate resources is a high priority for any business, but how does Microsoft protect a network perimeter that extends to thousands of global endpoints accessing corporate data and services 24 hours a day, seven days a week?

It’s all about communication, collaboration, and expert knowledge.

Phil Suver, senior director of networking at Microsoft, and his team help champion Zero Trust networking, an important part of Microsoft’s broader Zero Trust initiative. Driven by Microsoft’s security organization, the Zero Trust model centers on strong user identity, device-health verification, application-health validation, and secure, least-privilege access to corporate resources and services.

“Zero Trust networking is ultimately about removing inherent trust from the network, from design to end use,” Suver says. “The network components are foundational to the framework for our Zero Trust model. It’s about revising our security approach to safeguard people, devices, apps, and data, wherever they’re located. The network is one piece. Identity and device health are additional pieces. Conditional access and permission are also required. That involves the entire organization.”

Indeed, this extensive initiative affects all of Microsoft and every employee. To support the Zero Trust initiative, Microsoft’s network engineering team is partnering with the security and end-user experience teams to implement security policy and identity while ensuring productivity for employees and partners. Suver says that his team always aims to minimize those impacts and communicate how they ultimately result in benefits.

“We’re fundamentally changing the way our network infrastructure has worked for more than two decades,” Suver says. “We’re moving away from internal private networks as the primary destination and toward the internet and cloud services as the new default. The security outcomes are the priority, but we have to balance that against business needs and productivity as well so that connectivity is transparent.”

That means being sensitive to how implementing Zero Trust networking affects users on a granular level, to ensure that employees don’t experience work stoppages or interruptions.

“Some of our efforts aren’t very disruptive, as they’re simply accelerating in a direction we were already heading,” Suver says. “Shifting to internet-first and wireless-first network design, and enabling remote work are examples of that. Others are indeed disruptive, so we work closely with the affected groups to help them understand the impact.”

Suver notes that understanding and communication are critical to avoiding disruption.

“Microsoft is an established enterprise, with some software and systems that have been in place for decades,” he says. “To run our business effectively, we must be able to accommodate processes and technology that might not be immediately ready to transition to a Zero Trust architecture.”

We’re able to be a little more opportunistic and aggressive with our in-building connectivity experiences while our user base is working remotely. This has allowed us to roll out configurations and learn things with a much smaller user population on-campus.

– Phil Suver, senior director of networking

Suver stresses the importance of working closely with affected employees. “We need to partner closely with our engineering teams to understand their connectivity requirements and build solutions around those for the short term and then broaden our scope for the longer term.”

With more employees working from home than ever due to COVID-19, many deployments in Microsoft buildings have been implemented relatively quickly and efficiently because of the decreased on-campus presence. Engineering teams can perform rollouts, including deploying new network segments, creating new wireless connections, and deploying network security policy with much less disruption than if buildings were fully occupied.

“We’re able to be a little more opportunistic and aggressive with our in-building connectivity experiences while our user base is working remotely,” Suver says. “This has allowed us to roll out configurations and learn things with a much smaller user population on-campus.”

[Check out these lessons learned and best practices from the Microsoft engineers who implemented Zero Trust networking. Find out what Microsoft’s leaders learned when they deployed Zero Trust networking internally at the company. Read Brian Fielder’s story on how Microsoft helps employees work securely from home using a Zero Trust strategy.]

Managing Zero Trust networking across the enterprise

Mildred Jammer, Zero Trust network principal program manager at Microsoft, acknowledges that the inherent complexity of Microsoft’s operations—there are more than 1 million devices on Microsoft’s network, which supports more than 200,000 employees and partners, which requires a highly strategic planning approach to transition to a Zero Trust environment.

“It’s a huge scope, and we have so many different environments to consider. Unsurprisingly, planning is a top priority for our teams,” says Jammer, whose work centers around ensuring that people and functional groups across Microsoft unite to ensure that Zero Trust Networking initiatives receive the priority that they deserve.

Zero Trust networking goals include reducing risk to Microsoft by requiring devices to authenticate to achieve network access providing a network infrastructure that supports device isolation and segmentation. A third key goal is to devise a system for enhancing response actions if devices are determined to be vulnerable or compromised.

“Zero Trust networking extends beyond the scope of Microsoft networking teams,” Jammer says.

Jammer says that many business groups at Microsoft might not understand what Zero Trust networking is, or they might not consider it as important as other initiatives they’re supporting.

“Zero Trust networking is a huge priority for our teams, but our business groups have their own priorities that don’t account for Zero Trust,” Jammer says. “Neither priority is optional, and they may conflict. We must manage that.”

She says communication being upfront with requirements, and collaborating willingly across Microsoft to ensure everyone’s needs are met.

Jammer says that distilling high-level goals into smaller, more achievable objectives helps employees and partners understand the practicalities of Zero Trust networking so that her teams can establish realistic expectations. “For example, we worked with the security team to break down risk mitigation into specific risks and the outcomes,” she says. “We developed solutions to deliver the outcomes and grouped them when there were commonalities. If business priorities challenged our outcomes, we could break down those groupings, as necessary.”

Jammer cites the deployment of Zero Trust networking as an example, noting that her team initially planned to deploy globally across all wired and wireless networks.

“We planned for a full deployment, but soon learned how disruptive that would be to our developers and infrastructure,” she says. “So, we broke it into chunks, we implemented changes to wireless networks with internet-first posture, and then came back to address our wired networks. To minimize impact and identify best practices, we used flighting deployments with a ring-based approach, starting with a smaller, well-understood population that closely represented our larger target population. As we gained more experience and confidence, we expanded the deployment to reach a larger population.”

Jammer notes that using targeted, achievable goals not only help get work done but also help identify when larger goals might be challenging to accomplish.

“Breaking down large goals into an agile-friendly process was also crucial to demonstrate areas that simply weren’t achievable near term,” Jammer says. “It’s more concrete and actionable to tell someone that we can’t refactor a specific app to be internet-facing than it is to say that we can’t eliminate our corporate intranet infrastructure.”

Making Zero Trust networking a reality

For David Lef, Zero Trust principal IT enterprise architect at Microsoft, implementing Zero Trust networking in a live networking environment carries a significant challenge.

“Reducing risk is a big focus in Zero Trust, but we need to do so with as minimal impact to user experience and productivity as possible,” Lef says. “Our users and employees need this network to perform their job functions. There is a reality that some things have to continue to work in their current state.”

Lef cites a few examples, including printers that didn’t support internet connectivity, IoT devices that required manual configuration, and simple devices that didn’t support Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). “We isolate those on the network and potentially come back to them later while we address projects that are ready to adapt to Zero Trust.”

Lef’s team actively works to establish network access, implement policies, segment networks, and onboard Microsoft business groups, regions, and teams to the Zero Trust networking model. While Zero Trust networking is critical to enabling a Zero Trust model, enterprise-wide collaboration and adoption are equally vital.

“We put a lot of effort into observing activity and talking with our local IT representatives about the details and challenges of each phase of our implementation,” Lef says. “We created our deployment plans so that employees and partners could naturally adopt the new network designs and usage patterns without significant effort on their part.”

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

Lef notes that his team recommends best practices to partners and suppliers to help build Zero Trust-friendly products and solutions.

“Making legacy technology conform to Zero Trust is difficult. We want to adopt solutions built for Zero Trust networking across our entire enterprise as much as possible. Identities, devices, apps, data, infrastructure—they all contribute to the model, along with networking,” Lef says. “Across the organization, all of these need to be in place for a properly functioning Zero Trust model.”

Thinking about the broader picture

Soumya Subramanian, partner general manager of enterprise infrastructure services at Microsoft, recognized a need to bring multiple workstreams together to accommodate the size and scope of deploying Zero Trust networking.

As organizations consider the scope of what they want to achieve with Zero Trust, they should remember to think about other network modernization initiatives and be intentional in either combining them under the broader program or allowing them to operate independently.

– Soumya Subramanian, partner general manager of Enterprise Infrastructure Services

“We already had a workstream in flight to move remaining applications from the corporate network to the cloud” Subramanian says. “We also needed to accelerate our long-term plans for remote connectivity due to the pandemic, which allowed us to reevaluate remote access technologies under the context of Zero Trust. For instance, as you move high-volume applications off the corporate network and onto the cloud, you reduce VPN volumes and usage. You need to consider alternate remote connectivity solutions like Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), virtual desktops, and application proxy services in your Zero Trust networking scope, not just the in-building user experience.”

Subramanian notes that these efforts depend on network automation and data-collection workstreams that many organizations could use to accelerate Zero Trust deployment.

“We started to tie these efforts together so that the network designs and policies we created for Zero Trust could be managed through automation at scale. As a result, we’re more data driven with clear objectives and key results that connect these dependent workstreams.”

“As organizations consider the scope of what they want to achieve with Zero Trust, they should remember to think about other network modernization initiatives and be intentional in either combining them under the broader program or allowing them to operate independently,” Subramanian says.

• Check out these lessons learned and best practices from the Microsoft engineers who implemented Zero Trust networking.
• Find out what Microsoft’s leaders learned when they deployed Zero Trust networking internally at the company.
• Read Brian Fielder’s story on how Microsoft helps employees work securely from home using a Zero Trust strategy.

The post Sharing how Microsoft now secures its network with a Zero Trust model appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Evolving our culture of learning

Employees with a growth mindset are always learning, continuously curious, willing to take risks, and learn quickly from mistakes. We’re engaging employees to activate learning at Microsoft to support a growth mindset culture which values learning over knowing—seeking out innovative ideas, embracing challenges, and improving over time.

To enable this culture, we offer a diverse range of learning and development opportunities. We believe training can include more than formal instruction, and our philosophy focuses on providing the right learning at the right time, in the right way. In a culture of learning, our employees demonstrate a growth mindset and develop personally and professionally. When our employees become learners, they learn about our customers and their needs, being diverse and inclusive, working together as one, and—ultimately—making a difference in the world. A culture of learning extends beyond the skills needed for specific tasks.

Ensuring that our employees have the right skills they need to do their job is important, but equally important is having a broader understanding of how to be a good ally, or how to be a great people manager, or a stronger leader. All of that comes back to the importance of learning. It’s just a fundamental part of the fabric of human life.

—Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president, Talent, Learning, and Insights

“Learning encompasses many things,” says Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president of Talent, Learning, and Insights. “We learn in many ways––even just being aware of those around us and seeking to better understand each of them. Learning is building specific skills that allow people to be successful in their roles, to have career growth and progression, and it allows the organization to keep up with changes in our business.”

Whittinghill notes that the evolution of a culture of learning at Microsoft involves providing employees with learning experiences that encourage them to become learners all the time and of many things.

“Ensuring that our employees have the right skills they need to do their job is important,” Whittinghill says, “but equally important is having a broader understanding of how to be a good ally, or how to be a great people manager, or a stronger leader. All of that comes back to the importance of learning. It’s just a fundamental part of the fabric of human life.”

Learning is not only a necessity, but something that Microsoft believes is deeply and intricately connected to our overall success as individuals and as an organization. We recognized that to foster a growth mindset at Microsoft, we needed to evolve our learning culture to support changes in the broader organizational culture.

Our research across many organizations and industries has clearly demonstrated that employees want to learn. Data shows that if employees can’t learn and grow, they’ll leave. Seventy-six percent of employees say they’d stay at a company longer if they had more support for development and learning. Before implementing the new learning experience powered by Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub, we realized employees were facing consistent obstacles related to being able to personalize their learning, find time to learn, find relevant training, and finding training practical to them. We wanted to change that because, at Microsoft, we aspire to be a company where employees build long-lasting careers and embrace a learn-it-all culture where learning and growth are at the core of the employee experience.

To support the employee needs expressed by our research and foster a growth mindset at Microsoft, we’re enhancing the way that our employees learn. We’re providing learning experiences in the tools they use every day and empowering them to define their own learning journey.

[Read more about fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning. Explore evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva. Discover driving adoption of Microsoft Viva at Microsoft: Lessons learned.]

Fostering a growth mindset with a new learning experience

Our new learning experience, powered by Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub, is replacing existing learning portals and eliminating the requirement for learners to search different platforms to find the learning resources they need.

The Microsoft Viva Learning app makes content from LinkedIn Learning Hub and many other sources readily discoverable, shareable, and consumable from Microsoft Teams. Features such as learning keyword and interest searches, assigned learning, and sharing resources through social channels support learners in Viva Learning. LinkedIn Learning Hub provides an extensive library of content organized by skill, profession, and business group and allows learners to create, curate, and contribute to learning for themselves and others.

Whittinghill points it all back to employees: “We want engaged employees who feel they are supported in great careers, and so much of that is supported by learning and skilling. We can connect them to the learning resources they need and, through other Viva products, different aspects of learning such as knowledge management, sharing with their peers, engaging with a mentor, or better understanding how they make the most effective use of their day. It all fits together in creating that experience that employees desire.”

Launching the new learning experience required a large-scale change management effort sponsored by learning executives and supported by a program team and both product teams. The efforts included three primary pillars:

1. To prepare learners for the transition, a variety of communications were sent to content owners, program owners, and key learning stakeholders across Microsoft to inform them of the change and increase readiness within their organizations.
2. Stakeholders from across learning organizations took on change agent roles, circulated readiness resources, provided feedback, and stayed informed of the changes to come.
3. Both Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub were available for users to use and test for several months before the launch of the new learning platform. It was critical to ensure a seamless transition between the old learning platform to the new learning experience. Therefore, both experiences remained available for 2 months in parallel after launch to ensure learners had time to get familiar with the new experience. Operating both experiences also gave content and program owners adequate time to move their content to the new experience.

Fostering a growth mindset is at the forefront of learning. By adopting the new learning experience, over 200,000 global learners at Microsoft, representing a breadth of cultures, languages, and learning interests now have the unique experience to act as Customer Zero.

Contributing to a better product as Customer Zero

Before Microsoft customers and partners ever interact with new products and services, we evaluate those products on their behalf. For Microsoft Viva, the product groups have partnered with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) and Microsoft Human Resources (HR) to evaluate the app experiences with employees around the globe, serving as Customer Zero.

As Customer Zero, we’re at the forefront of development and implementation, working in collaboration with the Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub product groups. The key to succeeding as Customer Zero for the new learning experience is to envision and establish best practices for learning experiences, then use our insights and knowledge to inform direction and development in multiple ways. We listened to our global employees to better understand their learning needs, including factors such as language, culture, and specific compliance requirements. Then, we worked with product engineering to co-envision the right user experiences. We anticipated and addressed learning requirements that other large enterprise customers have, based on our experience managing large tenants at Microsoft. We researched employee needs, analyzed feedback, and used our insights to collaborate with product groups to influence design and development.

There are many examples of product improvement and evolution from our collaboration. We helped refine the process for automatically assigning informative thumbnails for courses. We requested the ability to assign relative weight to learning content to make certain content easier to discover. We also recommended that the Viva Learning product group provide an option to remove assigned learning from certain regions to comply with local regulations.

Throughout our collaboration with the product groups, integration of Microsoft’s learning catalog was at the center of our conversation. Our subject matter experts at MDEE and in HR contributed to defining enterprise grade API configurations that allow the inflow of our learning catalog, learning assignments, and course progress data into Viva Learning. These integrations, known as “custom LMS integrations,” are critical for large organizations that have a learning data services layer to manage data movement within their ecosystems. Three core APIs were developed:

• Catalog API: The metadata for a course, including title, description, and duration
• Course Status API: Course progress status for each learner
• Course Assignment API: Course assignments and recommendations for each learner

We also worked with the product groups on deeper integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory for generating learner accounts, making it easier to federate user data and connect our employees’ learning experiences effectively across all integrated platforms.

We have several collection points for our feedback, including pilot programs, change management, internal stakeholder reviews, user research, and data collected directly from Viva Learning itself. Each of them plays a significant role in informing the Viva Learning development teams on product successes and needs.

—Christopher Mead, principal product manager, Employee Learning and Development

Our feedback process as Customer Zero followed the Viva Learning development cycle. We accumulated feedback internally in two categories: bugs and feature requests. Bugs were addressed immediately while feature requests were captured as inputs into the product group’s semester planning process.

Christopher Mead, principal product manager for Employee Learning and Development, reflects on the process and his group’s role.

“The time elapsed between collecting and submitting feedback enabled us to ensure that we understood the root problem before collaborating with the product group on a solution,” Mead says. “We have several collection points for our feedback, including pilot programs, change management, internal stakeholder reviews, user research, and data collected directly from Viva Learning itself. Each of them plays a significant role in informing the Viva Learning development teams on product successes and needs.”

Testing both learning platforms was crucial for the successful launch of the learning experience and could not have been done without the support of eager early adopters at Microsoft. Not only did testing and piloting contribute to technical and product feedback, they allowed the program team to gain diverse, inclusive, and global perspectives.

Fusing technology and culture for learning in the flow of work

Viva Learning enables our learning management teams to surface content from our own internal training catalogs, third-party content providers, and existing learning management systems (LMS). Integration with learning management systems that are already in place is a big part of using Viva Learning as the primary learning experience platform at Microsoft. LinkedIn Learning Hub is one of those systems and a crucial element of the learning experience going forward, in combination with Microsoft Viva Learning.

“What we love about LinkedIn Learning Hub is how the offerings are instructor-led by subject matter experts in the particular field or topic, so it’s like attending a class every time you take a LinkedIn Learning Hub offering,” Whittinghill says.

The relatively simple integration and the two-way synchronizing of learner progress and course completion tracking made it easy to include LinkedIn Learning Hub and many other internal content repositories that were in place across the organization.

“It immediately increases the breadth of content available to learners,” Whittinghill says. “They have a deep, expert-driven content experience and the catalog is phenomenal. We can integrate that through Viva Learning and make the entire catalog available to employees globally. Bringing experiences and content together like this enables learning in the flow of work. It adds to creative flow and focus for our employees.”

The depth and breadth of the catalog from LinkedIn Learning Hub and many other LMSs at Microsoft reinforces the growth mindset of learning culture at Microsoft. Employees can gain expertise in their current profession or engage in learning that prepares them for career progression and enhancement or even a different career path altogether.

Expanding the learning experience also helps Microsoft employees to learn different ways to do the same thing. For example, running agile development teams is a big part of the software development process at Microsoft. There are many ways to these kinds of teams, and a large and diverse learning catalog exposes learners to those different formats, formulas, and approaches for a topic such as agile development.

The merging of technology and culture with the new learning experience will allow learners at Microsoft to shape their learning journey for themselves, their peers, and their teams as Customer Zero. However, the opportunities are limitless in the ways both platforms can be optimized by different teams and companies.

Providing practical learning experience benefits

Our employees are the primary benefactors of the Customer Zero collaboration with Microsoft Viva Learning in Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn Learning Hub. The adoption of the new learning experience at Microsoft is an ongoing effort, but our employees are already embracing learning in the flow of work.

Our subject matter experts follow the channels that host the content, so they get notified when someone asks a question in the chat about a session days, weeks, or months after the session is complete.

—Jeff Bogdan, director of learning, Windows Engineering

Microsoft Viva Learning makes collaboration between learners in Microsoft Teams more efficient and enables a more effective path to relevant learning experiences. The Viva Learning tab, for example, allows learners to curate learning content for their teams by blending content available in Viva Learning with local or team-specific resources to create a customized repository.

Jeff Bogdan is the Director of Learning for Windows Engineering at Microsoft. His team routinely runs live learning sessions in which they have four or five different presentations as options for team members to attend. Bogdan’s team has a problem that’s common at Microsoft: most employees can’t attend every one of the live sessions, even if they’re interested in the content. These presentations are hosted in Microsoft Teams. The integration between Teams and Microsoft Viva Learning helps his team members find relevant recorded presentation sessions and feel like they captured a sense of the live session.

Our primary goal is not necessarily the adoption rates of a specific product or tool, but rather that our employees are learning.

—Chris Shaffer, principal program manager, Engineering Learning

Bogdan says that having the sessions in Microsoft Teams also helps keep learners connected to the experts. “Our subject matter experts follow the channels that host the content, so they get notified when someone asks a question in the chat about a session days, weeks, or months after the session is complete,” he says.

Understanding successful learning in the flow of work

One of the most challenging aspects of adopting the new learning experience at Microsoft has been measuring success. Chris Shaffer is the Principal Program Manager for Engineering Learning at Microsoft, and his perspective on effective measurement of the new learning experience’s success goes beyond the standard numbers.

“Our primary goal is not necessarily the adoption rates of a specific product or tool, but rather that our employees are learning” Shaffer says.

He uses a striking example of when adoption numbers don’t tell the full story.

“We want technology to be the enabler for our employees,” Shaffer says. “Learning in the flow of work, as Viva Learning enables is success, but to put a number on it is very difficult. The goal is learning, not training. Learning is our outcome; training is simply an activity.”

Shaffer underscores the importance of growth mindset and building lifelong learners at Microsoft: “At Microsoft, we want a new mindset, new skills, and lasting changes in behavior.”

We want engaged learners, clear evidence that the new learning experience is providing the learning environment they need, and––ultimately––that Microsoft employees are embracing a culture of learning.

—Nur Duygun, business program manager, Learning and Talent Services

“We use many channels to measure and gather feedback from our employees,” says Nur Duygun, a business program manager for Learning and Talent Services at Microsoft. “We measure specific usage of the product across different elements of Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub. These are all useful for understanding how we can change the product to improve specific parts of the employee experience.”

Duygun concludes by reaffirming the importance of understanding how learning behaviors are changing in response to the new learning experience.

“We want engaged learners, clear evidence that the new learning experience is providing the learning environment they need, and––ultimately––that Microsoft employees are embracing a culture of learning,” she says.

The number of engaged quality learners—employees who consume more than two elective learning courses in a month—has increased by 58 percent since we launched, clearly showing that the new learning experience is key in supporting behavior change. Our employees are embracing the learn-it-all culture at Microsoft and integrating learning as a core part of their employee experience. As Customer Zero, we will continue to influence the evolution of the learning experience based on feedback from learners.

Moving forward

Living our culture means continuing to be curious and prioritizing learning. Microsoft Viva Learning in Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn Learning Hub are important enablers of our culture rooted in a growth mindset. We’re working on building Viva Learning even more deeply into the flow of work. In the near future, we’ll be using contextualized AI to augment our employees experience in Teams.

We’re also implementing individual features such as content ratings, uploading your own custom content, and adding reserved learning time to a Microsoft Outlook calendar based on course requirements. As our usage of the learning experience evolves, we will expand our measurement in parallel, including measuring skill-based learning consumption and other critical indicators correlated to our learning culture.  We aspire to provide even more opportunities with Microsoft Viva Learning for our employees to learn when and where they need it so they continue to grow and build a meaningful career at Microsoft.

The adoption of the new learning experience at Microsoft is an ongoing effort, supportive of the aspire-to learning culture, and employees are already embracing learning in the flow of work. As Customer Zero, we’re at the forefront of development and implementation, working in collaboration with the Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning product groups.

• Read more about fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning.
• Explore evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.
• Discover driving adoption of Microsoft Viva at Microsoft: Lessons learned.

The post Creating learn-it-alls at Microsoft with Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Fostering a learning culture

At Microsoft, we’re fostering an environment that creates time and space for learning that is flexible, where the desire to learn and grow comes before the need to know. Our learning culture celebrates creativity and ingenuity; our employees learn not only from successes, but also from experiments, mistakes, failures, and especially each other. We want our employees to be free to ask “why not” and “what if,” empowering them to be consistently curious and continuously learning.

We believe deeply in the importance of a growth mindset. Growth mindset is all about continuously learning and being aware. We’re evolving our culture of learning from being know-it-alls to being learn-it-alls.

—Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president, Talent, Learning, and Insights, Microsoft Human Resources

Learning is a celebrated part of Microsoft’s culture, and we treat learning as a core capability. At Microsoft, we reward employees for their growth mindset and curiosity, traits that help drive business outcomes. We want to empower learners who are invested in and motivated to take control of their learning journey—with personalized recommendations, consistent experiences, and relevant, easily discoverable resources. For Microsoft employees, learning is a career-long endeavor, with learners continuously building and sharpening skills and capabilities.

“We believe deeply in the importance of a growth mindset,” says Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president for Talent, Learning, and Insights in Microsoft Human Resources. “Growth mindset is all about continuously learning and being aware. We’re evolving our culture of learning from being know-it-alls to being learn-it-alls.”

[Read this Customer Zero story on how we’re upgrading our employee learning experience with Viva Learning. | See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. | Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.]

Accelerating learning culture with Viva Learning

Viva Learning is accelerating the transformation of our learning culture and helping us provide employees with high-value learning opportunities within the Microsoft Teams experience.  Positioned as the streamlined learning component of Viva, Microsoft’s employee experience platform (EXP), Viva Learning brings personalized and relevant learning experiences into the flow of work. Viva Learning serves as a front door for employee learning at Microsoft.

We believe that learners should take ownership of their individual growth and development. Viva Learning helps us equip learners with what they, as individuals, need to learn. Our users receive a personalized, adaptive learning experience that provides meaningful, timely, and relevant resources and recommendations natively integrated into the tools they already use throughout the workday. We want learning experiences to be relevant to each person. As such, Viva Learning is designed to understand who each learner is, including needs such as location, goals and ambitions, and learners’ previous experiences and existing skills.

Our employees start their day in Teams and work much of the day within the Teams interface. Viva Learning integrates with multiple Teams features and contributes to learning in the flow of work. We didn’t need to invest in a platform to host the front-end. We simply took advantage of our existing investment in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and Teams.

—Christopher Mead, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

With Viva Learning, learners can easily discover resources through search and browsing. They receive personalized resource recommendations and have access to an abundant set of third-party resources. However, we help guide the learning experience by being intentional about how we curate content and make it discoverable.

Viva Learning is structured as a hub that enables learning in the flow of work. The Viva Learning tab in Teams gives our employees access to all available learning resources in an easily navigable single view. Our learning management teams can surface content from our own internal training catalogs, third-party content providers, and existing learning management systems (LMS) across desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Christopher Mead, principal program manager for Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, summarizes the benefit of Viva Learning’s Teams integration. “Our employees start their day in Teams and work much of the day within the Teams interface. Viva Learning integrates with multiple Teams features and contributes to learning in the flow of work.” Mead adds, “We didn’t need to invest in a platform to host the front-end. We simply took advantage of our existing investment in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and Teams.”

Learning resources can be delivered through Teams in a one-on-one chat, a group chat, or a meeting. Our employees can infuse learning into the conversations already happening at work by sharing learning content and courses with a single-click. Our employees get the training they need and even the training they didn’t know they needed through a curated and managed experience. Our Learning teams can place easily discoverable learning content within Teams where employees can track completed learning items across training content providers and manage their individual learning journeys. This content includes assigned learning, featured content, and peer recommended learning, all of which contribute to a targeted learner experience and help grow the culture of learning at Microsoft.

Adopting Viva Learning as Customer Zero

A culture of learning centers on our people, so it’s only natural that adopting Viva Learning begins with the most people-centric part of our organization, Microsoft HR, in collaboration with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. Our deployment and implementation teams have partnered with Microsoft HR from the very beginning of our journey toward Viva Learning. Early on, we invited our HR and Learning teams to ask themselves, “How could Viva Learning enhance the service I deliver?”

Partnering with Microsoft HR and our Learning teams provides our implementation teams with the organizational influence to ensure that employees are encouraged to adopt Viva Learning. With Microsoft HR’s support, we can ensure that employees receive education on the platform’s capabilities and that organization-wide messaging is communicating the importance and value of Viva Learning to our employees’ learning experience.

We’re adopting Viva Learning as our primary learning experience platform in the context of what we call Customer Zero. We all use our own products, and we use them extensively. We obsess over the employee experience to ensure that our products and services don’t just meet our own employees’ needs, but exceed them. The Customer Zero program helps us apply our internal learnings to improve our solutions, ensuring that our products also exceed our customers’ expectations.

Building a better learning experience with Customer Zero

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small-and-midsized customers.

As Customer Zero for Viva Learning, we have a unique opportunity to inform product development by aligning closely with product teams and internal stakeholders responsible for deployments, granting us the ability to address challenges other customers may experience through early and extensive feedback.

We collaborate closely with the Viva product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of the Customer Zero partnership, Microsoft HR and our implementation teams get early access to new features and a chance to steer the product roadmap in a direction that best meets real enterprise learning needs. This enables our own learning experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Viva Learning development process.

Improving features based on practical experience

Customer Zero has influenced the development of Viva Learning in many ways. For example, when working with the platform’s ratings and reviews features, our learning management found that the typical star rating system was useful to assess and report the quality of different learning resources. However, management didn’t find the same usefulness in the review capability, which almost never provided value to learners, especially if negative reviews were posted for mandatory courses that our learners were required to take, regardless of the review.

Many other features have been influenced directly by feedback from our Microsoft HR and learning teams, including:

• Automatically assigning informative thumbnails for courses.
• Assigning relative weight to learning content to make certain content (such as corporately sponsored training) easier to discover.
• Providing an option to remove assigned learning from certain regions to comply with local regulations.

As Customer Zero, we’re positioned to ensure that every feature in Viva Learning—right down to the finest detail—meets the need of both our organizations and our customers.

Integrating and consolidating our learning environment

Moving to a new learning-experience platform can be a daunting endeavor. Like many organizations, we have significant investments in learning-management solutions and training platforms. We have created a large catalog of learning resources. Providing unified access to these resources is a big part of how we’re fostering a culture of learning. A critical part of choosing to adopt Viva Learning at Microsoft was the platform-agnostic capabilities of Viva Learning’s APIs. These APIs helped our implementation teams integrate internal learning solutions and third-party providers with Viva Learning. With this approach, we were able to bring our capabilities and content into the broader picture of learning at Microsoft without needing to convert, remove, or otherwise change them. This enabled us to capitalize on existing learning investments and more quickly implement Viva Learning as our primary learning experience platform.

For example, we use LinkedIn Learning across Microsoft for a wide variety of learning capabilities. LinkedIn Learning contains a tremendous catalog of learning resources that we use frequently. We used the Viva Learning APIs not only to make the LinkedIn Learning content available through Viva Learning, but also to send data from LinkedIn Learning back to Viva Learning to track course completion and other important metadata. We can use the APIs in the same way across many learning sources, creating a unified catalog and a unified learner experience.

Viva Learning’s content-discovery capabilities provide easy surfacing of relevant training materials to our learners and ease of access to the learning that they need. We’ve experienced a significant increase in optional learning-resource usage as a result. Today, our learners are finding and using more learning resources that are relevant to them and that facilitate their learning journey.

Moving forward

We’re using Viva Learning to enable a learning experience in the flow of work at Microsoft. As Customer Zero, we anticipate that our employees’ learning experience will continue to align increasingly with our culture of learning. Improvements in efficiency and relevance, especially from AI and peer recommendations, will continue to drive a more relevant and effective learning experience.

Here are some of the top things we learned deploying Viva Learning here at Microsoft:

• The Customer Zero initiative is helping to create better Microsoft products such as Viva Learning for Microsoft and our customers.
• Viva Learning helps us centralize and simplify the learning experience for our employees.
• Viva Learning enables consolidation of learning resources through a set of open APIs and integrations.
• Learning-content discovery and search capabilities in Viva Learning create better opportunities for employees to find the learning resources that apply to them.

• Read this Customer Zero story on how we’re upgrading our employee learning experience with Viva Learning.
• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn more about how we’re accelerating Microsoft’s digital transformation with Microsoft Viva Goals.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

The post Cultivating a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Capturing evidence with Microsoft Azure confidential ledger

Microsoft Azure confidential ledger gives the team a head start on managing evidence records. Based on a permissioned blockchain model, Azure confidential ledger offers unique data-integrity advantages, including immutability, making the ledger append-only and tamper proof. This structure helps ensure that all records are kept intact.

In our environment, proving that some action occurred, or piece of data existed can be difficult, especially after some time has passed. The solutions we’re building around Azure confidential ledger provide an attested, reliable source of truth for our teams to use for compliance-related data.

—Martin O’Flaherty, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

The confidential ledger runs exclusively on hardware-backed secure enclaves, a heavily monitored and isolated runtime environment that keeps potential attacks at bay. No one is above the ledger, not even Microsoft. Azure confidential ledger runs on a minimal trusted computing base (TCB), which prevents access to ledger service by developers, datacenter technicians, and cloud administrators.

Martin O’Flaherty is leading the implementation of Azure confidential ledger within MDEE. “In our environment, proving that some action occurred, or piece of data existed can be difficult, especially after some time has passed,” says O’Flaherty, a principal PM manager in MDEE. “The solutions we’re building around Azure confidential ledger provide an attested, reliable source of truth for our teams to use for compliance-related data.”

O’Flaherty stresses the importance of a centralized location for all users of compliance data. “Our engineers know where they need to store compliance data and our compliance managers have a single point of reference,” he says. “In addition, auditors have an attested, comprehensive data repository that they can use to observe and confirm compliance in whatever regulatory domain they’re investigating.”

Azure confidential ledger offers storage for a multitude of evidence types, including records related to business transactions, updates to trusted assets, administrative control changes, and operational and security events. All data entries can be verified for all user transactions through transaction-specific receipts. Tamper evidence is also available for server nodes and blocks stored on the decentralized ledger.

We use Azure DevOps for the majority of our application development. Any changes made to our internal applications, services, and solutions are managed through Azure DevOps, so it’s a great place to start collecting the data necessary for SOX compliance. Azure confidential ledger provides a huge improvement over our previous methods for tracking this data.

—Damon Gray, principal group engineering manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Evidence recorded in the Azure confidential ledger returns a tamper-proof signed receipt that can be referenced for auditing. This improves the evidence collection and verification process, thus increasing efficiency and allowing teams more valuable time to innovate. For the MDEE team and the auditors they support, Azure confidential ledger serves as a one-stop, centralized, and verifiable evidence store.

Tracking Sarbanes-Oxley compliance data in Microsoft Azure DevOps

The team in MDEE is currently implementing a solution for tracking Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance across Microsoft Azure DevOps environments. SOX compliance records are required for many operational and financial events. For example, applications, services, and solutions that the Employee Experience team manage all have SOX–based requirements for change auditing.

“We use Azure DevOps for the majority of our application development,” says Damon Gray, a principal group engineering manager in MDEE. “Any changes made to our internal applications, services, and solutions are managed through Azure DevOps, so it’s a great place to start collecting the data necessary for SOX compliance. Azure confidential ledger provides a huge improvement over our previous methods for tracking this data.”

When SOX auditors audit changes in SOX–bound applications, they look for clear documentation of the required steps used to deploy changes to application code into the production environment. In the past, engineering teams created an email containing all the necessary deployment details, including service catalog information, build data, pull-request details, release notes, and release approval. The email was circulated to the engineering team, and an engineering manager validated all changes and marked the deployment for approval After a formal email approval from the engineering manager was received, the release manager in the team takes the deployment to production.

Azure confidential ledger is perfect for use cases where critical metadata records must be stored in an unmodifiable, permanent state. It’s an immutable store that our SOX auditors can consult with full confidence in its integrity and validity.

—Abarna Bose, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

“With Azure confidential ledger, the manual nature of this process becomes automated and centralized,” says Bhavana Konchada, a senior software engineer in MDEE. “Potential for human error in the email-based processes is replaced by the consistency of proscribed automated processes. Data taken out of the Azure DevOps context via email in the previous processes remains intact in Azure DevOps and is sent directly to Azure confidential ledger.”

The solution can be customized to streamline other audit processes like HIPPA, CMMC and other federal audits. “Azure confidential ledger being backed by blockchain technology makes it a preferable and trustworthy solution for auditors,” Konchada says.

Integrating Azure confidential ledger with Azure DevOps is a relatively straightforward process. The team uses a custom Azure DevOps pipeline task that’s injected into the end of the release pipeline, containing the SOX–relevant data. When the release is triggered, Azure DevOps calls the custom task that writes the data to Azure confidential ledger. Specifically, data can include the change that was made, who made the change, when the change was made, and whether the change was approved.

“Azure confidential ledger is perfect for use cases where critical metadata records must be stored in an unmodifiable, permanent state,” says Abarna Bose, a principal product manager who is responsible for SOX compliance standards in MDEE. “It’s an immutable store that our SOX auditors can consult with full confidence in its integrity and validity.”

Ensuring the quality and integrity of compliance data isn’t easy in a large environment like ours. The required information is always stored in many different locations, under the management of many different teams, and these locations are often difficult to catalog.

—Astha Sinha, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Bose underscores the importance of a centralized store, when SOX–bound applications and services are scattered across different business groups and Azure DevOps accounts at Microsoft. “A central store like the one we’re using in Azure confidential ledger is invaluable. It infuses simplicity into an otherwise complicated and fragmented set of development environments,” she says.

Extending Microsoft Azure confidential ledger

O’Flaherty and his team are expanding the scope of their SOX compliance solution for Azure DevOps and are investigating other areas where Azure confidential ledger can be used to implement centralized compliance data management at Microsoft. His team has learned many lessons from their implementation.

“Ensuring the quality and integrity of compliance data isn’t easy in a large environment like ours,” says Astha Sinha, a senior product manager for developer experiences in MDEE. “The required information is always stored in many different locations, under the management of many different teams, and these locations are often difficult to catalog.”

Sinha and her team are using confidential ledger to make it easier for developers and auditors to track compliance in line with the development process, without extra work or processes piled on top. The solution is helping to build stronger trust within the regulatory compliance environment and providing a trustworthy source of compliance information that can be widely used.

Here are some insights we learned as we transformed our internal auditing processes:

• Boosting productivity: Developing this solution will help ensure authenticity of evidence and reduce the amount of time spent authenticating and validating data.
• Reinforcing trust in your organization: Driving this kind of transformation will allow you to build stronger customer relationships because you will be providing them with more trustworthy information.

• Learn more about modernizing enterprise integration services using Azure.
• Unpack bringing Microsoft’s commerce platform to Azure.
• Find out how Microsoft is using shielded virtual machines to help protect high-value assets.

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