At Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), we’re embracing our digital transformation and the culture changes that comes with it. With over 98 percent of our IT infrastructure in the cloud, we’re adopting Microsoft Azure monitoring, patching, backup, and security tools to create a customer-focused self-service management environment centered around Microsoft Azure DevOps and modern engineering principles. As we continue to benefit from the growing feature set of Azure management tools, we’ll deliver a fully automated, self-service management solution that gives us visibility over our entire IT environment.

The result?

Business groups at Microsoft will be able to adapt IT services to best fit their needs.

[Explore shining a light on how Microsoft manages Shadow IT. | Discover enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft. | Unpack creating the digital workplace at Microsoft.]
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Digital transformation at Microsoft

Our MDEE team is a global IT organization that strives to meet Microsoft business needs. Microsoft Azure is the default platform for our IT infrastructure. We host 98 percent of our IT infrastructure in the cloud. Here are a few details:

• More than 220,000 employees
• 150 countries
• 587 locations
• 1,400 Azure subscriptions
• 1,600 Azure-based applications
• 17,000 Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) virtual machines
• 643,000 managed devices

Like most IT organizations, we have our roots in the datacenter. In the past, our traditional hosting services were mostly physical, on-premises environments that consisted of servers, storage, and network devices. Most of the devices were owned and maintained for specific business functions. Technologies were very diverse and needed people with specialized skills to design, deploy, and run them. Our achievements were limited by the time required to plan and implement the infrastructure to support the business.

As technology evolved, we began to move out of the datacenter and into the cloud. Cloud-based infrastructure created new opportunities for us and has transformed the IT infrastructure we manage. We continue to grow and adapt in a constantly changing IT landscape.

Traditional IT technologies, processes, and teams

Our traditional datacenters were managed by a legion of IT pros, who supported the diverse platforms and systems that made up our infrastructure. Physical servers, and later virtual servers, numbered in the tens of thousands, spanning multiple datacenters and comprising a mass of metal and silicon to be managed and maintained. Platform technologies ranged from Windows, SQL Server, BizTalk, and SharePoint farms to third-party solutions such as SAP and other information security-related tool sets. Server virtualization evolved from Hyper-V to System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Orchestrator.

To provide a stable infrastructure, we used structured frameworks, such as IT Infrastructure Library/Managed Object Format (ITIL/MOF). Policies, processes, and procedures in the framework helped to enforce and control security and availability, and to prevent failures. Microsoft product engineering groups that used hosting services had a similar adoption process for their application and service needs, which were based on ITIL/MOF.

This model worked well for traditional IT infrastructure, but things began to change when cloud computing and Microsoft Azure began to influence the IT landscape.

Evolution of the hybrid cloud

As IT infrastructure and services began to move to the cloud, the nature of the cloud and how we treat it changed. We’ve now been hosting IT services in Microsoft Azure for a long time, and as Azure has evolved and grown, so has our engagement with Azure services and the volume of our IT services hosted in Azure.

Early Azure: IT-owned, IaaS, and lift-and-shift

In the early years, Microsoft Azure was IT only. We had full control of cloud development, implementation, and management. We could create and manage solutions in Azure, but it was a siloed service.

The infrastructure consisted primarily of IaaS virtual machines that hosted workloads in the cloud the same way that they hosted workloads in on-premises datacenters.

Efficiency gains were small and infrastructure management still used the same tools—sometimes hosted in the cloud and sometimes hosted on-premises and connected to the cloud. It was very much a lift-and-shift migration from the datacenter to the cloud, and our management processes imitated the on‑premises model in much the same way.

The datacenter remained the focus, but that was changing.

Microsoft Azure evolves: PaaS, co-ownership, and cloud-first

As Microsoft Azure matured and more of our infrastructure and services moved to the cloud, we began to move away from IT‑owned applications and services. The strengths of the Azure self-service and management features meant that a business group could handle many of the duties that we offered as an IT service provider—which meant that they could build solutions that were more agile and responsive to their needs.

Microsoft Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) functionality matured, and the focus moved from IaaS-based solutions to PaaS-based solutions. Azure became the default target for IT solutions; datacenter decommissioning began as more solutions moved to or were created in Azure. Monitoring and management was becoming cloud-focused as we pointed more of our System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) instances at the cloud. Azure-native management started to mature.

Large-scale Azure: Service line–owned, IT-managed, PaaS-first

PaaS quickly became a focus for developers in our business groups, as they realized the agility and scalability they could achieve with PaaS-based solutions. Those developers shifted to PaaS for applications as we transitioned away from IaaS and virtual machine-based solutions.

With the advent of Microsoft Azure Resource Manager, which permitted a broader level of user control over Microsoft Azure services, we saw service lines begin to take ownership of their solutions, and business groups started to manage their own Azure resources.

The datacenter became an inconvenient necessity for apps that couldn’t move to Microsoft Azure. We still used SCOM and SCCM as the primary monitoring and management tools, but we had moved almost all our instances into IaaS implementations in Azure. Azure-native management became a mature product, and we started to plan and deliver a completely cloud-based management environment.

Microsoft Azure in a DevOps culture: Service line–managed, Internet-first, business-first

We’re continually nurturing a DevOps culture—DevOps has transformed the way that Microsoft Azure solutions are developed and operated. Our Azure solutions offer an end-to-end view for our business groups. They’re agile, dynamic, and data-intensive. Continuous integration and continuous development create a continual state of improvements and feature releases.

The Microsoft Azure solutions that our business groups use are designed to respond to their business needs. We actively seek and use Azure-native tools for control over and insight into IT environments, in Azure first, but also, back to the datacenter where required. We’re a long, long way past managing a stack of metal. The modern workplace is here at Microsoft, and it changes every day.

Realizing digital transformation

In the modern workplace, the developers and IT decision makers in our business groups have an increasingly critical business role. Our business groups need the autonomy to make IT decisions that serve their business needs in the best way possible. With 98 percent of our IT infrastructure in Microsoft Azure, we’re increasingly looking to the agility, scale, and manageability that Azure provides. Using this scale, we solve business needs and provide the framework for a complete IT organization, from infrastructure to development to management.

Managing the modern hybrid cloud

Our modern hybrid cloud is 98 percent Microsoft Azure—and Azure is the primary platform for infrastructure and management tools. Azure is not only the default platform for IT solutions—it is our IT solution.

Just as PC sprawl occurred in the late 1990s and server sprawl did the same thing in the 2000s, cloud sprawl is a growing reality. Implementing new cloud solutions to manage the cloud environment and the remaining on-premises infrastructure is critical for our organization. The new Cloud solutions scope includes the flexibility for our engineers to leverage PaaS, Functions, and Container models to optimize the management of Cloud Environments.

Embracing decentralized IT

Decentralized IT services are a big part of digital transformation. We need a management solution that offers us—and our business groups—what we need to manage our IT environments. We always want to maintain governance over security and compliance of Microsoft as a whole, but we also realize that decentralized IT services are the most suitable model for a cloud-first organization.

By decentralizing services and ownership in Microsoft Azure, we offer our business groups several benefits:

• Greater DevOps flexibility.
• A native cloud experience: subscription owners can use features as soon as they’re available.
• Freedom to choose from marketplace solutions.
• Minimal subscription limit issues.
• Greater control over groups and permissions.
• Greater control over Microsoft Azure provisioning and subscriptions.
• Business group ownership of billing and capacity management.

Our goal in the management of modern hybrid cloud continues to be a solution that transforms IT tasks into self-service native cloud solutions for monitoring, management, backup, and security across our entire environment. With this solution, our business groups and service lines have reliable, standardized management tools, and we can maintain control over and visibility into security and compliance for our entire organization.

The areas where we retain oversight include:

• General IT and operational policy implementation, as approved by the subscription owner. Areas include compliance, operations, and incident management.
• Shared network connectivity over Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, as needed.
• Visibility into infrastructure inefficiencies and self-service tool development.

Our management solution must be as agile as the solutions we manage, and we provide best practices, standards, and consulting for Microsoft Azure management solutions to ensure that our business groups are getting the most out of the platform.

Supporting digital transformation with Microsoft Azure management tools

Managing the hybrid cloud in Microsoft Azure encompasses a wide range of services and activities. For our business groups to improve, they need to monitor their apps and solutions to recognize issues and opportunities. They need a patching and management solution that keeps systems up to date, manages configuration, and automates common maintenance tasks.

We must protect data with a disaster recovery platform and ensure security and compliance for business groups and the entire company. We use the management tools in Microsoft Azure to enable hybrid cloud management.

Monitoring the hybrid cloud

Monitoring is an essential task for our business groups and their service lines. They need to understand how their apps are performing (or not performing) and have insight into their environment. We’ve used SCOM for monitoring at Microsoft for more than 10 years—and a certain rhythm develops when you use a product for that long.

To ease the transition from SCOM to Microsoft Azure monitoring, we developed transition solutions that use native Azure functionality to recreate certain SCOM functions and views in Microsoft Azure Monitor.

The transition solutions consist primarily of PowerShell scripts and documentation. They give our business groups a familiar environment to work in while they become familiar with Microsoft Azure monitoring.

Our business groups can also start in a standardized environment with our built-in tested security and compliance components. This helps us maintain a centralized standard while allowing for decentralized monitoring. We maintain metrics for critical organizational services, but we leave operational monitoring to each business group.

Our Microsoft Azure monitoring is designed to:

• Create visibility. We’re providing instant access to a foundation set of metrics, alerts, and notifications across core Azure services for all business units. Microsoft Azure Monitoring also covers production and non-production environments, as well as native monitoring support across Microsoft Azure DevOps.
• Provide insight. Business groups and service lines can view rich analytics and diagnostics across applications, as well as compute, storage, and network resources, including anomaly detection and proactive alerting.
• Enable optimization. Monitoring results help our business groups and service lines understand how users are engaging with their applications, identify sticking points, develop cohorts, and optimize the business impact of their solutions.
• Deliver Extensibility. Designed for extensibility to enable support for custom event ingestion, and broader analytics scenarios.

We’ve now retired our SCOM environment, leaving Microsoft Azure monitoring as the default for both cloud and on-premises monitoring now focusing on:

• Automated installation and repair of the Microsoft Monitoring Agent using Microsoft Azure Runbooks.
• Centralized visibility into comprehensive health and performance.
• Fully featured transition solution development to enable complete self-service monitoring in Microsoft Azure.
• Complete transition from SCOM to Microsoft Azure.

Patching, updating, and inventory management

As we’ve done for monitoring, we’re using transition solutions to make it easier for business groups to transition from previously used on-premises tools to Microsoft Azure.

Our patching processes depended on our preexisting solutions as we worked through the transition to Microsoft Azure. SCCM and associated agents provided the bulk of our patching, software distribution, and management process, but we’ve moved to Azure in a phased approach as our Azure subscriptions become ready to transition to Azure for management.

We’ve built transition solutions for our business groups to help them transition from the SCCM platform and other legacy tools to the Microsoft Azure update management patching service. We’re maintaining and modifying these transition solutions as Azure features replaced the on-premises functionality.

From a patching and management perspective, we’re focusing on:

• The transition of inventory management from Configuration Manager to Microsoft Azure, including discovery, tracking, and management of IT assets.
• Transition of our update processes to Microsoft Azure Update Management for business groups.
• Enabling self-service patch management. We’re developing an orchestrated deployment of operating system and application updates with Microsoft Azure, including centralized compliance reporting.
• Creating and updating solutions to support the transition of the above areas, including Resource Manager templates, PowerShell scripts, documentation, and Microsoft Azure Desired State Configuration.

The design for patching and management, as with monitoring, is to provide an Microsoft Azure-based self-service solution for our business groups that gives them control over their patching and management environment while giving us the ability to centrally monitor for compliance and security purposes.

Ensuring recoverable data

With Microsoft Azure as the primary repository for business data, it’s extremely important to have an Azure backup solution with which our business groups and service lines can safeguard, retain, and recover their data.

Our data recovery solutions address the following major areas of concern:

• Recover business data from attacks by malicious software or malicious activity.
• Recover from accidental deletion or data corruption.
• Secure critical business data.
• Maintain compliance standards.
• Provide historical data recovery requirements for legal purposes.

Our Microsoft Azure data footprint is immense. We currently host 1.5 petabytes of raw data in Azure and use almost nine petabytes of storage to back up that data.

We’re using Microsoft Azure Backup as a self-service solution. It gives business groups more control over how they perform their backups and gives them responsibility for backing up their business data—because each business group knows its data better than anyone else.

We’re also using Microsoft Azure Backup for virtual machine-level backup, and we’re backing up some on-premises data to Microsoft Azure using Microsoft Azure Recovery Services vaults. We’ve created a packaged solution for backup management in Azure that consists of scripts and documentation—our business groups can use it to migrate to Azure Backup quickly and efficiently.

As with other areas of enterprise management, we’re evaluating new features for Microsoft Azure Backup that will offer more backup capabilities to our business groups.

Embedding security and compliance

Decentralization gets the greatest scrutiny when it comes to security and compliance. We’re responsible for security and legal compliance for the organization, so our security controls are the most centralized of all the cloud management solutions we implement. However, centralization does not directly affect day-to-day solution management for our business groups and their service lines.

We leveraged a broad set of security and compliance practices and tools that are generally applied across all Microsoft Azure subscriptions. The following imperatives govern the general application of security and compliance measures:

• Microsoft Azure Policy. Using Azure Policy, we establish guardrails in subscriptions that keep our service engineers within governance boundaries automatically. Policy can help control a myriad of settings by default, including limiting the network configurations to safe patterns, controlling the regions and types of Microsoft Azure resources available for use, and ensuring data is stored with encryption enabled.
• Automation gives us a chance to keep pace with the constantly changing cloud environment. DevOps is heavily centered on end-to-end automation, and we need to complement DevOps automation with automated security. Automated security saves significant time and cost for apps that are frequently updated, and we can quickly and consistently configure and deploy security.
• Empower engineering teams. In an environment where change is constant, we want to empower our engineering teams to make meaningful, consistent changes without waiting for a central security team to approve an app. Our engineers need the ability to integrate security into the DevOps workflow. They don’t have to take extra measures to be secure, nor do they need to wait for a central security team to approve an app.
• Maintain continuous assurance. When development and deployment are continuous, everything that goes with them needs to follow suit—including security assurance. The old requirements for sign-offs or compliance checks create tension in the modern engineering environment. We want to define a security state and track drift from that state to maintain a consistent level of security assurance across the entire environment. This helps ensure that builds and deployments that are secure when they’re delivered stay secure from one release iteration to the next and beyond.
• Set up operational hygiene. We need a clear view of our DevOps environment to ensure operational hygiene. In addition to understanding operational risks in the cloud, DevOps operational hygiene in the cloud requires a different perspective. We need to create the ability to see the security state across DevOps stages and establish capabilities to receive security alerts and reminders for important periodic activities.

At MDEE, our goal is a completely cloud-based, self-service management solution that gives our business groups concise control over their environments using Microsoft Azure tools and features. We’ll continue to offer updated Azure-based solutions, transitioning away from on-premises, System Center–based management.

As we continue to transition business groups to cloud-based monitoring, we’re growing our feature set and making our Microsoft Azure-based management even better. We envision a near future where our management systems will be completely cloud based, decentralized, and automated—and our organization continuing to build our business in Azure.

• Explore shining a light on how Microsoft manages Shadow IT.
• Discover enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft.
• Unpack creating the digital workplace at Microsoft.
• Read more about understanding our business with app telemetry in Microsoft Azure.
• Check out instrumenting ServiceNow with Microsoft Azure Monitor.
• See how Microsoft is transforming its own patch management with Azure.

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Microsoft Digital has developed tools and processes that help us effectively manage physical IT assets and resources. But with the increase in cloud resources comes some unique challenges. Conventional processes weren’t adequately giving us visibility into self-provisioned usage and related risks. Teams and business units at Microsoft could acquire cloud resources on behalf of the organization without passing through the traditional controls that give us some level of oversight and governance.

The adoption of self-service cloud technologies was making it difficult for us to keep up with rapid changes. We needed better visibility into Azure resource utilization for individual employees, groups, and roles. To improve our ability to manage Azure resources and to help ensure compliance, we developed processes to help us:

• Create and maintain an inventory of the Azure subscriptions and resources used within the enterprise.
• Define a methodology to help us correlate detailed resource-level records with operational visibility. This provides a cross-checked resource management mechanism that can be audited.
• Develop a system for Azure usage management that uses the inventory to help us drive the most efficiency and value from our Azure resources.

Improving the efficiency of Azure resources

In a cloud environment, performance and availability of business workloads are often addressed by initially overestimating the compute and storage resources required. We didn’t have visibility to collect usage data or to determine whether the resources required to run an application were in alignment with the demand or needs of the business. To be more efficient with resources, we needed a way to identify underutilized capacity, dormant or orphaned resources, and other undesirable artifacts that can lead to increased costs and unnecessary risk or complexity. Our starting point in addressing the challenge was to gather and maintain an accurate inventory of the resources within Azure to help ensure that the proper controls are practiced, optimize resources, and mitigate unsanctioned cloud use.

Reducing risks through increased visibility

As an IT organization, we can’t manage risks that we can’t see. We require visibility into our environment to help us effectively measure, manage, and protect our infrastructure and systems. For our behavior-based Security Incident and Event Management (SEIM) systems to perform their functions, they rely on an accurate view into IT infrastructures. When assessing compliance, security, cost-effectiveness, efficiency, troubleshooting, or other important functions, we need the capability to view and delve into every resource to determine its purpose, who can access it, and its value to the business.

Understanding the risk and usage profiles of both sanctioned and unsanctioned Azure cloud resources requires the collection of accurate Azure resource and usage information—they’re necessary for correlating risks and behaviors. Implementing appropriate controls and a method to monitor for unsanctioned usage helps us reduce the risks associated with unsanctioned and unknown cloud resources. Those risks include:

• Inefficient use of resources. Trying to manage and support unsanctioned cloud resources consumes unnecessary time, effort, and expense. Audits and investigations can provide inaccurate or less effective results, and it can be difficult, or impossible, for us to enforce security policies on unsanctioned cloud resources.
• Process maturity and execution inefficiencies. Although we’re working to advance operational levels of process maturity, unsanctioned and unknown cloud resources can lead to inefficiencies in:
  • Compliance and policy audits, and overall audit effectiveness.
  • Inventory and configuration management processes and practices.
  • Patch and vulnerability management.
  • Quality and operational processes.
• Data loss or leakage. Unsanctioned and unknown cloud resources expand our threat surface. If cloud services are used to store business data, it occurs outside of our organizational policies and controls—and that data could be exposed, or exploited.

Creating an Azure resource inventory with usage and reporting capabilities

Just about everything in Azure that’s associated with an account or a subscription is considered a resource. There can be thousands of resources used for a single Azure deployment, including virtual machines, Azure Blob storage, address endpoints, virtual networks, websites, databases, and third-party services.

To be able to produce a comprehensive inventory, we needed to be able to answer the following questions about all of the Azure resources in use across the organization:

• What is it?
• Where is it?
• What is it worth?
• Who can access it?

We’re responsible for managing the on-premises and cloud resources in our environment at Microsoft. Because cloud services are self-service and constantly changing, we needed to ensure that any methodology that we created to inventory Azure resources was agile enough to keep pace.

We designed an Azure inventory solution that would collect subscription information from our internal billing system, resource and usage data from Azure Resource Manager, and store it in an Azure SQL database. The collected data could then be audited and reported on.

Step 1: Locating and identifying the subscriptions within the enterprise

Subscriptions help us organize access to cloud service resources. They also help control how resource usage is reported, billed, and paid for. Each subscription can have a different billing and payment setup, so you can have different subscriptions and different plans by department, project, regional office, and so on. Every cloud service belongs to a subscription, and the subscription ID may be required for programmatic operations.

To identify which subscriptions we had in the environment, we generated a list from our internal billing system. The list we pulled from the internal billing system represented our “universe” view of all of the Azure subscriptions we would be collecting resource information for in Azure Resource Manager.

NOTE: Customers with an Azure Enterprise Program Agreement can access usage and billing information through a representational state transfer (REST) API. An enterprise administrator must first enable access to the API by generating a key from the Microsoft Azure Enterprise Portal. Anyone with access to the enrollment number and the key has read-only access to the API and data.

Step 2: Ensuring access to the subscriptions

Azure Resource Manager is a central computing role within Azure that provides a consistent layer for administrating and managing cloud resources. It’s also the component responsible for providing access to detailed resource usage reports and data. We use Azure Resource Manager REST APIs to pull resource and usage information from Azure Resource Manager into the data collection solution we built.

To effectively monitor Azure cloud usage and access privileges, our administrators required both visibility and administrative access into subscriptions and resources to list, monitor, and manage them. We created an Azure Active Directory service principle object that provides read-only access to our automated data collection tool.

Step 3: Building a data storage solution for subscription and resource metadata

We built a storage solution for subscription and resource metadata that we collect from the billing system and Azure Resource Manager using Azure SQL. We use Blob storage for backup. The datasets that we collect from the APIs aren’t standard, so we parse and structure them before we place them into the Azure SQL database. Our primary data storage solution supports only structured data, but our backup Blob storage supports unstructured data.

Step 4: Constructing an automated data collection tool

The data for the Azure resource inventory comes from 60 APIs, so we couldn’t rely on manual processes to collect that data with any regular frequency. Manual processes don’t scale and aren’t cost effective. We constructed an automated data collection tool that calls the numerous REST APIs to capture and store the metadata on a daily basis. The automated tool is a Windows virtual machine that has a C# native application running on it that calls the 60 Azure REST APIs. The application captures and parses the returns of each dataset before storing it in the Azure SQL database. The tool then creates a backup copy in Azure Storage.

Using an automated tool for data collection provides reliable results on a predictable schedule and saves us a great deal of time and money

Step 5: Consolidate and link together datasets to create a subscription-level view

Each dataset represents a single object or view of the information. We use the unique subscription IDs and resource names to create subscription-level views that we can compare to our Azure baselines. After the data is consolidated and linked to its subscription ID and resource name, we can begin working with it to analyze and audit for specific activities, using familiar productivity tools like Power BI, Excel Power Query, or Excel PowerPivot. We regularly send Azure configuration insight reporting data to two internal portals—one that’s related to security and compliance, and another that reports organizational efforts to keep devices safe by keeping them current. We also use the resource information in our reporting to identify areas in which we have an opportunity to improve compliance through user education. Some of the reports we use include:

• Azure Security Center alerts and compliance report. With this report, we pull a list of alerts that are found in Azure Security Center and provide detailed statistics, such as the number of High, Medium, and Low alerts found in the environment and the top subscriptions that are seeing alerts. The target audience is application teams and their organizations to help focus their efforts.
• Compliance reporting by group. For our compliance reporting, we apply our baselines and aggregations to the Azure inventory. The compliance rates can be viewed at either an organization or team level to provide overall or drill-down information about compliance. The target audience is management and compliance leadership, to help them drive Azure security and compliance.
• Compliance reporting for user role authorization. This report helps us identify user role authorization, assess them against the baselines as defined by the security use case, or narrative, and determine corresponding compliance rates against it per resource. This report includes the:
  • Total number of administrators in the environment.
  • Average administrator counts across groups and teams.
  • Number and names of non-employees that have privileged roles in subscriptions (contributor, administrator, and so on).
  • Number of potential unauthorized assignments.
  • Names of the people who created the potential unauthorized assignments.
  • Role type assignment details.
• Resource type count report. This report includes a breakdown of resource type counts across the organization. including Azure SQL, Azure Virtual Network, virtual machines, Azure storage, and so on. It also contains a breakdown of resource type counts in the three fundamental cloud service models, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).

• We’ve improved our visibility of Azure resources, and that has numerous benefits. Azure makes it easier to provision virtual machines and scope and scale Azure resources for testing. The inventory makes us better able to identify qualified resources for testing products and services.
• We can make better decisions about cloud utilization, and reduce costs. And we’re reducing risk through our ability to easily identify and mitigate unsanctioned cloud applications. We’re better able to manage and audit Azure resources, to meet compliance standards by providing oversight and governance.
• We didn’t stop there—after creating the inventory, came the task of managing our resource and subscription configurations.

• Manage Azure resources with PowerShell and Resource Manager
• Azure Resource Manager overview

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At Microsoft, personas are commonly clustered based on three factors: the major organization within the company, the employee’s profession, and the employee’s geographic location. A Microsoft seller working in Latin America has different search interests than an engineer working in China, for example. As a result, it can be challenging to accommodate the markedly different interests of these two employees while enabling them to search efficiently.

In parallel, Microsoft separates search activities into two logical sets.

The first is enterprise-wide search, in which search users don’t know the exact source for the content they’re seeking but want to find appropriate content from across the company. The second is tool-specific search, when users search within Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft SharePoint, and other applications or tools they’re using, and they’re expecting to find the content they want within that application or tool.

Microsoft’s central search administration team focuses on enterprise-wide search, striving to make it as effective as possible. The scale of enterprise-wide search within Microsoft is 1.1 million enterprise-wide searches per month on our corporate SharePoint site plus Bing’s work vertical. Central search administration doesn’t currently configure search in other tools such as Outlook, internally developed applications, or individual SharePoint sites.

Microsoft Search is bringing enterprise-wide search capabilities to many different endpoints, such as the Outlook app, Microsoft Word, and Windows Search Box. Any enterprise-wide search in those endpoints is also of interest to search administration.

Based on the findings of several surveys of our employee community, we’ve categorized searches into two broad sets:

• Quick find (re-find). The employee knows that something exists and just wants to get to that content. This activity accounts for approximately 70 percent of our enterprise-wide search volume.
• Research (investigate). The employee needs information or an answer requiring some in-depth content reading, analysis, or review. This search type accounts for approximately 30 percent of our enterprise-wide search volume.

[Explore how we’re monitoring end-to-end enterprise health with Microsoft Azure. | Read more about instrumenting ServiceNow with Microsoft Azure Monitor. | Discover how we’re making content more accessible and searches more efficient at Microsoft.]

Enabling optimal search

Based on survey findings and other internal data on search activities, search administration set a primary goal: enabling employees to find the information that they need as quickly as possible.

Industry research conducted by firms such as McKinsey & Company, in its report “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,” and Gartner, in “Improving the Employee Experience Improves the Customer Experience,” has revealed that that the average employee spends an estimated 6 to 25 hours per month searching for information. Employees use this information to perform current work, provide better-quality answers to customers, and other purposes. So, the benefits of search start with direct productivity gains and extend to indirect benefits that result when employees have the appropriate information available when they need it.

To deliver the best possible search experience, Microsoft search admin uses most of the capabilities that Microsoft Search provides via the Microsoft 365 admin center. These capabilities include:

• Bookmarks
• Q&A
• Locations
• Acronyms
• Connectors

Search admin also uses two additional mechanisms outside the admin portal—the SharePoint hybrid crawler and a custom content export/import process that our internal IT team—Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE)—built several years ago, before connectors were introduced.

Business impact of search

By aggregating a variety of telemetry, some of it custom developed, search administration has determined that nearly half of all searches benefit from one of the search admin capabilities. Our employees who receive such benefits average a one-minute faster search completion time than those whose searches don’t use those capabilities.

Across 1.1 million monthly searches at Microsoft, that time savings amounts to more than 6,000 hours a month of direct employee-productivity benefit. The indirect benefits that McKinsey & Company and Gartner research identified can multiply that productivity benefit, doubling or tripling it depending on how the calculation is performed.

At Microsoft, we achieve these results through an investment of 300 hours per month in search admin time.

To manage and continually streamline employee search activity across Microsoft, search admin conducts a broad range of activities on a daily, monthly, and quarterly basis, as depicted in the graphic below.

Daily activities

• Process bookmark requests: SharePoint Search and Bing provide feedback options that enable employees to submit bookmark suggestions. Review bookmark requests as they arrive and add to the collection if appropriate.
• Process support requests: SharePoint Search provides a form that employees can use to ask for help with their search. Review and answer search-support requests.
• Review new sites: Brief check of Microsoft’s internal news site for any new products, new internal sites, or other announcements that may warrant proactively creating a bookmark.
• Perform search health check: Review the search-health monitoring dashboard, note any major incidents, and appropriately forward notifications of failovers or other outages.
• Monitor connections: Review connector job logs. Resolve any errors and resubmit.

Monthly activities

• Review search log: Review logs to locate queries that have sufficient usage but produce sub-par organic results. Create bookmarks or Q&A blocks as appropriate.
• Fix broken links: Run a third-party link-checking tool to locate any broken links in the bookmarks. Replace or remove broken links.
• Update search help site: Update search help site to reflect new features and services.
• Reload acronyms: Obtain an updated list of acronyms from the corporate taxonomy. Remove the existing acronyms and replace with the updated acronym list.
• Review recurring events: Review bookmarks related to reoccurring events. Deactivate bookmarks in the off months and reactivate bookmarks for upcoming events.

Quarterly activities

• Tune bookmarks: Review usage metrics to locate bookmarks that aren’t receiving minimum usage. For us, minimum usage is three or more clicks per month, but that threshold could vary for other enterprises.
• Reload locations: Obtain an updated list of company locations from our real-estate organization, Microsoft Global Workplace Services. Erase the existing location data in the admin portal and replace it with the updated information.
• Review friendly URLs: Review the shortened links that receive the most usage and add any that meet our criteria.

Where to start

Because resources are always limited, lessons from the Microsoft experience can help organizations when they’re deciding where to invest search admin effort. The table below shows the user benefit we were able to measure associated with the activities described in earlier sections.

Benefits of search admin activity.

Given these benefits, our experience leads to a sequence of three steps to take when beginning search administration, starting with the one that has the greatest user impact. The following paragraphs describe the scope of each step and the intended benefit.

1. Implement active-bookmark management. Bookmarks are the best way to support Quick Find (re-find) use cases. For instance, by defining a bookmark along with a friendly name and entering keywords for common misspellings, the search admin staff can provide a bookmark when a user attempts a quick navigation in a browser but misspells a term. Search admin can also ensure that the correct authoritative content is placed at the top of search results.

Other suggestions follow:

• In partnership with bookmark management, including acronyms and locations provides good value, but only if your search admin can import this content from other sources.
• Where bookmarks exist for a particular search term or topic, define a Q&A. The answer text lists the most common links to be followed and it describes and groups them in a logical manner based on the different personas. For instance, if cloud is a common search term, sellers might have a very different set of content they’re seeking than IT technicians would. So, creating an answer showing five to 10 potential links, with a description of the focus of each one and how they fit together as a whole, is beneficial.

2. Connect additional content. Microsoft Search, by default, covers SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive and is working to enable additional content to be brought in from across Microsoft 365. There likely are many other content sources in any organization—internally developed applications, third-party apps, internal websites, and others. Identify the most important content sources for your company and create a way to add them to search. Multiple mechanisms can help you do this, from using the SharePoint hybrid crawler, to using Microsoft connectors, to creating custom connectors and entirely custom processes.

One way that Microsoft search admin identifies such content is from Microsoft Azure Active Directory authentication reports. Identify the application registrations that receive the most authentication activity. Another way is to ask users what they’re seeking when they search.

3. Provide search support. Within Microsoft, our search admin team has partnered with our internal library services so that any search feedback that indicates a desire for help with searching can enlist a librarian’s help with that search. That option is also available from the search self-help site.

Although search is generally intuitive, many aspects of it aren’t, such as using Keyword Query Language (KQL) to better target a query. Therefore, providing information to employees about how and where to search for popular types of content is appreciated. Especially with new employees, it’s valuable to provide a quick-reference card or equivalent resource to help them during their first weeks of employment.

While return on investment (ROI) on this service is low, users are very appreciative of it. In addition, a few times a year Microsoft has found that the content that the user accessed has directly and positively affected corporate revenue and customer service.

Active administration of search is worth doing for any large enterprise. For Microsoft, our investment of 300 hours per month yields a benefit of more than 8,000 hours of productivity gain per month. Exactly how to administer search will vary for every enterprise, but at a minimum, creating and maintaining bookmarks to popular sites and covering popular topics will provide significant benefit to your company.

Steps to take every day

We provide some minimum activity and related numbers used in the details that follow. Internally, Microsoft logs more than 1 million enterprise searches per month, and those searches use more than 80,000 unique search terms. You can adjust any of the thresholds to be more appropriate to your organization.

Process bookmark requests

SharePoint Search and Bing incorporate feedback options that enable employees to submit bookmark suggestions. Whenever one is submitted, it’s reviewed for:

• Accuracy – the suggested page provides accurate, current information that isn’t already covered by another bookmark.
• Access – the suggested page is accessible to all Microsoft full-time employees, at a minimum.
• Query usage – the suggested or potential keywords associated with the bookmark have been searched at least 20 times in one month before they’re added to the bookmark collection.
  • There are exceptions, such as new products, technologies, and initiatives, for example, which may not currently appear in query logs but have the potential of becoming popular search terms.
  • The SharePoint Search logs can be used to review the query frequency.
• Current visibility in search results is poor – the suggested page doesn’t appear in the first page of search results for the bookmark’s suggested or potential keywords.

If the suggested bookmark meets the established criteria, it’s added to the enterprise bookmarks.

Whenever possible, search staff capture the name of the content owner that the bookmark points to, because the staff sometimes need this information to perform future administrative work.

Process support requests

Within Microsoft, we’ve created a Microsoft Search self-help site to provide guidance on where to search for what kind of content. In addition, there’s an option to request help from our search staff to find a specific topic. Whenever those requests are received, the search staff perform their own search actions to find the desired content. Because the staff are very knowledgeable about how to use search, they typically find content that the employee hadn’t found. In sharing the results with the employee, the search staff highlight what kind of search they found most beneficial, so that the employee gains insight into how they might improve their search the next time.

Depending on the nature of the request, our search staff might also update a bookmark’s keywords or description to improve search results for the topic.

Review new sites

Review the Microsoft corporate SharePoint portal and internal newsfeeds for any new products, new internal sites, or other announcements. For each, perform a search to check the organic search results, and then create a bookmark if necessary.

Because of our established process for removing unused bookmarks, will typically create a bookmark for major new items if they appear to be of interest to a large portion of Microsoft.

Perform search health check

When current search-health telemetry is available from the product, search staff will review health metrics there. In the meantime, some custom telemetry capabilities have been created to enable monitoring of search performance. Any spikes or drops are reported to the appropriate team.

Additionally, search staff perform several searches on SharePoint and Bing manually, timing how long it takes for search results to display in each search platform and ensuring that all search functions (bookmarks, filters, and added content) are performing as expected.

Monitor connections

Search staff evaluate each search connector connection defined in our environment, making sure that the connectors are listed as healthy. So far, there have been few errors—much better performance than the SharePoint hybrid crawler, which has a high error rate. Highlights from errors that have occurred include:

• Permissions to the content source have been lost or expired. We resolve this by getting those permissions renewed.
• A new version of the connector has been received. This tends to be a problem unique to internal Microsoft, as the company is commonly an early adopter of such releases. In these cases, search admin typically must delete and re-create the connection.

Steps to take monthly

Review search log

This activity reviews popular search terms from the previous month and ensures that either good-quality natural search results appear or that a bookmark or other search aid already exists.  Beginning with the search logs, the process includes:

1. Excluding search terms that the organization has blocked. These include things like confidential and Attorney/Client Privileged.
2. Excluding search terms that have a frequency below a certain threshold. Our current minimum threshold is 50; other companies may set a different value.
3. Excluding search terms that are in quotation marks or that indicate testing or monitoring, such as aaaaaaa.
4. Exporting the current bookmark list and all associated keywords. Exclude search terms that already exist as keywords.
5. For the search terms that remain, consider the following:
   1. Perform a search using that search term and evaluate the results.
   2. If the results are fine as they are, no action is needed.
   3. If the content that’s the best fit for that search term isn’t positioned near the top of the first page, create a bookmark or add to an existing bookmark so that the term is positioned appropriately.

Fix broken links

Keeping bookmarks and other admin-configured links accurate is a constant challenge at Microsoft. User feedback, as described earlier, is one mechanism that we use to learn about these issues. Another is the monthly broken-links check process. That process includes the following activities:

1. All bookmark URLs are exported to a plain text list.
2. Search staff process the list through a third-party link checker and review each URL that returns an error code or redirect notification. The decision-making guideline follows; note that you may need refinements and exceptions for your organization.

If a “Not Found” error was returned. First, manually research the topic to determine if a replacement site has been created. If so, update the bookmark with the new URL. This manual research includes performing searches and investigating the results returned or contacting the site owner—if search staff has that information or can locate it easily. Otherwise, remove the bookmark.

If a “Redirect” error was returned. If the bookmark URL is a registered friendly name, ignore this error. If the redirect URL simply adds “/EN-US/” (or something similar), ignore the error. Finally, if the redirect URL only adds query parameters, ignore the error.

Otherwise,, manually navigate to the original URL, follow it to the new URL, and then validate that the new URL content matches the bookmark. If so, update the bookmark with the new URL.

If a “Restricted Access” error was returned. Ignore the error, because even though search administration doesn’t have access to the content, the URL exists.

Update search help site

To help our user community work more efficiently when they’re searching for information across the company, we’ve created a SharePoint portal specific to search. That portal has a few major components, which are structured as sections within the portal:

What to use when. This section provides brief descriptions of the major search tools available within Microsoft and the type of content that they encompass. This covers our primary enterprise-wide search portal, Bing’s work search, and other search tools specific to individual personas or divisions within the company.

How to use major search tools. This section provides tips on how to use major search tools (SharePoint, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams, for example). It also includes a subsection on how to make content more visible, targeted to content owners.

Help me find something. This section enables anyone in the company to ask the search-support team to help them find information on a topic. Employees can also use this tool to make suggestions or provide feedback.

Reload acronyms

At Microsoft, this activity involves using the SharePoint Term Store to maintain an overall corporate taxonomy. This repository includes a large set of acronyms, which are loaded into the search admin portal. Search admin staff manages acronym refresh as follows:

• Corporate exports acronyms from SharePoint Term Store.
• Search admin checks the layout, adjusting it as needed, and then imports it by using the acronym import capability in the search admin portal. This process performs a complete overwrite of existing acronyms, because it’s easier to eliminate incorrect or outdated acronyms than it is to selectively identify needed changes.

Review recurring events

Every company stages major corporate events that occur on a regular basis, perhaps annually, quarterly, or monthly. Bookmarks for these events are very popular in the weeks leading up to and following such events but aren’t needed outside of that timeframe.

Search admin maintains a simple spreadsheet of these events and their frequency/active dates.

• If an event is coming up and has reached its appropriate timeframe, search admin confirms that the event is still happening, locates the official information site, and creates a bookmark.
• If the event is coming up, but there doesn’t appear to be an official site or the event has been canceled, the spreadsheet is updated appropriately by updating or removing the event.
• If the event has passed and has reached its appropriate timeframe, search admin removes the bookmark. Disabling the bookmark is another option.
• It’s rare, but possible, for an event to become more frequent, such that the bookmark can remain active indefinitely. In that case, remove the event from the spreadsheet.

Steps to take quarterly

Tune bookmarks

When this telemetry is available from the product, search staff review existing bookmark usage data. In the meantime, it’s possible to export the search logs and merge them with bookmarks by using the keywords.

• Search admin only reviews bookmarks that have been active for the previous 90 days. This allows new bookmarks, especially for new events or content, to have time to generate usage.
• Bookmarks receiving fewer than three searches in the previous 90 days are removed.

When telemetry allows, search admin wants to:

• Remove bookmarks receiving fewer than three clickthroughs in the previous 90 days.
• Remove bookmarks that were displayed fewer than 100 times in the previous 90 days AND were clicked less than 25 percent of the time.

Reload locations

The Microsoft Real Estate and Facilities (RE&F) team maintains a database of all corporate locations, which search admin accesses via a Microsoft Excel add-in. Search admin filters the locations to only those to which employees are likely to travel—that is, locations that aren’t inactive or under construction.

The search administration portal has a location import capability, which accommodates loading this information. Because location loading is more complex than acronym loading, our steps are:

1. Get the current list of official corporate buildings from our building management system.
2. Reconcile to the current list in search administration.
3. Make appropriate changes.

Review friendly URLs

Within Microsoft, friendly URL names are very popular, and we’ve developed an application to manage them. As a result, search staff can ask the friendly-name apps team for a periodic export that includes the friendly name and how often the name has been used in the previous 30 days.

Any friendly name meeting the following conditions will have a bookmark created for it:

• More than 1000 uses in the previous 30 days.
• Links whose destinations are:
  • Associated with the company
  • Information pages (versus files, download pages, or videos)
  • Not already indexed or bookmarked
  • URLs that provide a clear indicator of their title or purpose

• Explore how we’re monitoring end-to-end enterprise health with Microsoft Azure.
• Read more about instrumenting ServiceNow with Microsoft Azure Monitor.
• Discover how we’re making content more accessible and searches more efficient at Microsoft.

The post Generating great results: Administering search at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft has fully embraced being a flexible workplace, which means that hybrid meetings—where some people join remotely and others join from a Microsoft worksite—are increasingly common.

What does that mean?

From May to November 2022, the number of monthly hybrid meetings we’ve held at Microsoft increased nearly 92 percent. To put that in perspective, during those six months, we held nearly 2 million hybrid meetings here at Microsoft.

With that in mind, how are we making sure our hybrid meetings are inclusive and effective for everyone involved, no matter how they’re joining? In theory, it’s simple:

• Bring remote-meeting etiquette to the meeting room
• Agree on and adopt new best practices that support hybrid

You’ll notice these focus on behavior. We’re not asking people to use new technology; we’re asking them to change how they use existing technology. And as most of us know from personal experience, changing behavior is hard.

In Microsoft Digital (MSD), we power, protect, and transform the employee experience and provide the blueprint for customers and partners to follow. We wondered, how could we help people at Microsoft shift habits and change how they think about meetings to build a healthy meeting culture?

Changing behavior is hard. Gamification can help.

Eighty percent of US workers believe game-based learning is more engaging than other types of training. When Avanade (a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft) gamified sales training, the region with the highest program participation had 33 percent higher sales. There’s science behind the benefits of play-based learning, too. Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has said, “Nothing lights up the brain like play. Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe—the executive portion—helps contextual memory be developed.”

So we teamed up with the Minecraft Education team to explore whether we might develop a Minecraft learning experience about hybrid meetings. Minecraft: Education Edition is a game-based learning platform used by millions of teachers and students. Learners can explore a wide range of subjects in immersive, blocky worlds including computer science, reading and history, and sustainability.

In the past, the Minecraft team has collaborated with partners including Microsoft’s Inclusive Hiring team, Sustainability, and Real Estate & Facilities on Minecraft worlds that illuminate key topics or support company initiatives. We pitched the concept of a hybrid learning map to the Minecraft Education team, and they were immediately supportive.

Having a deep background in gaming, I am very aware of the magic that can happen during gameplay. When Laura came to us with the idea for a game, we wanted to understand if it would resonate with our large and diverse internal audience. After a couple of conversations about the value of gameplay in learning, and the broad appeal of Minecraft, I was all in.

—Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Seamless Teamwork team

“Figuring out how to portray a business setting in Minecraft (with mobs!) sounded like a fun challenge,” says Bryan Bonham, senior business program manager for Minecraft Education.

It was a natural next step to partner with the team at Microsoft that is trying to help employees get more out of the many hybrid meetings that they now attend every day.

“Having a deep background in gaming, I am very aware of the magic that can happen during gameplay,” says Sara Bush, principal PM manager on MDEE’s Seamless Teamwork team. “When Laura came to us with the idea for a game, we wanted to understand if it would resonate with our large and diverse internal audience. After a couple of conversations about the value of gameplay in learning and the broad appeal of Minecraft, I was all in.”

Remote and hybrid work has led to some funny moments for all of us. I think adding some humor helps when learning something new. Best not to take yourself too seriously, we all make mistakes as we learn!

—Bryan Bonham, Senior Business Program Manager, Minecraft Education

This was a first-time collaboration between MSD and Minecraft and the first time Minecraft was used within Microsoft to support employee learning.

From idea to execution

The concept we landed on was “Hybrid Hero: The game where the fate of a meeting lies with you!” The player experiences different scenarios and must make the right choices to ensure their meeting is effective and inclusive. We based the game’s script and decision points on the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide, which is full of research-based guidance.

Early on, we decided that humor was key.

“Remote and hybrid work has led to some funny moments for all of us,” Bonham says. “I think adding some humor helps when learning something new. Best not to take yourself too seriously. We all make mistakes as we learn!”

We also wanted to make sure Hybrid Hero was accessible and fun for everyone at Microsoft even if they’ve never played Minecraft before. In every round of testing, we looked at the game from a newbie mindset.

“I’ve never played Minecraft before but figured that if preschoolers are playing it, I can surely play it, too,” says senior program manager Chanda Jensen, who supports meeting technology for Seamless Teamwork. “Most of the game was intuitive and really easy to get the hang of, and it was a fun way to teach hybrid-meeting best practices. As an added bonus, my kids now think my job is ‘cool.’”

In early testing, 93 percent of players responded positively to the game as did 88 percent of first-time players. Making sure the game was beginner-friendly paid off.

Let the games begin

Since it launched in September 2022, Hybrid Hero has been played by Microsoft employees in 40 countries, and we’ve heard from global teams who’ve used it as both a learning opportunity and team morale event. The game’s internal marketing campaign has garnered over 350,000 impressions on Yammer, helping to spread the word about hybrid-meeting best practices.

Hybrid Hero was truly a “One Microsoft” effort, requiring all team members to think outside the box and approach the project with a growth mindset. Employees are eager for innovative learning opportunities, and we’ll continue to do our best to innovate and create exceptional experiences for them.

For more information about teaching and learning with Minecraft: Education Edition, visit education.minecraft.net. Anyone can download a few demos of the game and try lessons like the Minecraft Hour of Code. Microsoft employees can sign in with their corporate email account to access the full game features and content.

• After years of remote-only meetings, employees need to shift habits and change how they think about meetings to create a healthy meeting culture.
• For hybrid meetings to be inclusive and effective, people need to be aware of and follow hybrid-meeting best practices.
• Gamification and play-based learning are often more engaging and effective for employees.
• Employees are eager for innovative learning experiences.

• Check out advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.
• Learn more about education opportunities with Minecraft.
• Discover why employees are buzzing with meeting room excitement in The Hive.

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 Teaching Microsoft employees healthy hybrid meeting habits with Minecraft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Keeping tabs on the millions of annual transactions is no small task—just ask Shashi Lanka Venkata and Mark Anderson, two company employees who are leading a bid to automate what historically has been a painstakingly manual revenue transaction process.

“We support close to 50 million platform actions per day,” says Venkata, a principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “For a quarter-end or a month-end, it can double. At June-end, we’re getting well more than 100 million transactions per day.”

That’s a lot, especially when there cannot be any mistakes and every transaction must be processed in 24 hours.

To wrangle that high-stakes volume, Venkata and Anderson, a director on Microsoft’s Business Operations team, teamed up to expand the capabilities of Customer Obsessed Solution Management and Incident Care (COSMIC), a Dynamics 365 application built to help automate Microsoft’s revenue transactions.

[Learn more about COSMIC including where to find the code here: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions.]

First tested in 2017 on a small line of business, the solution expanded quickly and was handling the full $100 billion-plus workload within one year.

That said, the team didn’t try to automate everything at once—it has been automating the many steps it takes to process a financial transaction one by one.

“We’re now about 75 percent automated,” Anderson says. “Now we’re much faster, and the quality of our data has gone way up.”

COSMIC is saving Microsoft $25 million to $30 million over the next two to three years in revenue processing cost. It also automates the rote copy-and-paste kind of work that the company’s team of 3,800 revenue processing agents used to get bogged down on, freeing them up to do higher value work.

The transformation that Anderson, Venkata, and team have been driving is part of a larger digital transformation that spans all Microsoft Digital. Its success has led to a kudos from CEO Satya Nadella, a well-received presentation to the entire Microsoft Digital organization, and lots of interest from Microsoft customers.

“It’s been a fantastic journey,” Anderson says. “It’s quite amazing how cutting edge this work is.”

Unpacking how COSMIC works

Partners transact, purchase, and engage with Microsoft in over 13 different lines of businesses, each with its own set of requirements and rules for processing revenue transactions (many of which change from country to country).

To cope with all that complexity, case management and work have historically been handled separately to make it easier for human agents to stay on top of things.

That had to change if COSMIC was going to be effective. “When we started, we knew we needed to bring them together into one experience,” Venkata says.

Doing so would make transactions more accurate and faster, but there was more to it.

“The biggest reason we wanted to bring them together is so we could get better telemetry,” he says. “Connecting all the underlying data gives us better insights, and we can use that to get the AI and machine learning we need to automate more and more of the operation.”

Giving automation its due

The first thing the team decided to automate was email submissions, one of the most common ways transactions get submitted to the company.

“We are using machine learning to read the email and to automatically put it in the right queue,” Venkata says. “The machine learning pulls the relevant information out of the email and enters it into the right places in COSMIC.”

The team also has automated sentiment analysis and language translation.

What’s next?

Using a bot to start mimicking the work an agent does, like automatic data entry or answering basic questions. “This is something that is currently being tested and will soon be rolled out to all our partners using COSMIC,” he says.

How does it work?

When a partner submits a transactional package to Microsoft, an Optical Character Recognition bot scans it, opens it, checks to see if everything looks correct, and makes sure business roles are applied correctly. “If all looks good, it automatically gets routed to the next step in the process,” Venkata says.

The Dynamics workflow engine also is taking on some of the check-and-balance steps that agents used to own, like testing to see if forms have been filled out correctly and if information extracted out of those forms is correct.

“Azure services handle whatever has to be done in triage or validation,” he says. “It can check to see if a submission has the right version of the document, or if a document is the correct one for a particular country. It validates various rules at each step.”

All of this is possible, Venkata says, because the data was automatically abstracted. “If, at any point the automation doesn’t work, the transaction gets kicked back for manual routing,” he says.

As for the agents? They are getting to shift to more valuable, strategic work.

“The system is telling them what the right next action is going to be,” Venkata says. “Before this, the agent had to remember what to do next for each step. Now the system is guiding them to the next best action—each time a step is completed, the automation kicks in and walks the agent through the next action they should take.”

Eventually the entire end-to-end process will be automated, and the agents will spend their time doing quality control checks and looking for ways to improve the experience. “We want to get to the point where we only need them to do higher level work,” he says.

Choosing Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure

There was lots of technology to choose from, but after a deep assessment of the options, the team chose Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure.

“We know many people thought Dynamics couldn’t scale to an enterprise the size of Microsoft, but that’s not the case anymore,” Venkata says. “It has worked very well for us. Based on our experience, we can definitively say it can cover Microsoft’s needs.”

The team also used Azure to build COSMIC—Azure Blob Storage for attachments, Azure Cosmos DB for data archival and retention, SQL Azure for reporting on data bases, and Microsoft Power BI for data reporting.

Anderson says it’s a major leap forward to be using COSMIC’s automation to seamlessly route customers to the right place, handing them off from experience to experience without disrupting them.

Another major improvement is how the team has gained an end-to-end view of customers (which means the company no longer must ask customers what else they’re buying from Microsoft).

“It’s been a journey,” Anderson says. “It isn’t something we’ve done overnight. At times it’s been frustrating, and at times it’s been amazing. It’s almost hard to imagine how far we’ve come.”

• Learn more about COSMIC including where to find the code here: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions.

The post How automation is transforming revenue processing at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Digital is creating a modern support experience that focuses on identifying and remediating issues automatically by enabling seamless support, generating high-quality knowledge content, providing a unified agent experience, and maintaining infrastructure and site-service excellence.

“In talking with our customers and partners, we are hearing that a modern digital support experience that can enable a hybrid working environment is a priority but may seem daunting and complex,” says Trent Berghofer, General Manager of Microsoft’s Modern Support team in Microsoft Digital. ”However, with a comprehensive vision-led approach and targeted investment, the results yielded can have a significant impact.”

Modern Support is part of a broader vision focused on enabling the most productive employee experience possible in today’s ever-changing environment. The team is a diverse, multi-disciplined group of IT professionals that manage end user support, site services, infrastructure deployments, and venture integration to drive employee productivity. This team plans, learns, and adapts to drive and transform the modern employee support journey at Microsoft.

To create an efficient and effective digital first employee support experience, the Modern Support team is improving auto-healing capabilities and enabling digitally assisted support through seamless interaction for employees by providing broad access to support with in-context tools.

Transforming agent assisted support at Microsoft

Although service-level metrics have traditionally been important in overall support health, the need to put greater emphasis on the digital employee experience has proven to be critical. It’s important to understand not only if services and tools are functioning properly, but also whether they meet employees’ and support agents’ needs.

In the area of agent assisted support, Modern Support efforts focus on the two key roles that participate in support activities: employees who experience and report issues and the support agents and technicians who track and resolve those issues.

Several factors prevent employees and agents from experiencing and delivering optimal support. The shift from a support model where work tasks are costly, complex, and require significant support intervention to a model that creates experiences that are easily discoverable, simple, accessible, personalized, and automated greatly improves the overall dynamic. By connecting the experiences that exist today—and the ones in the future—in an end-to-end way, this new model better reflects how people want to seek help, outlined below.

The four pillars of Microsoft’s Modern Support Experience

The team is pursuing Microsoft’s Modern Support vision based on these four critical pillars with our employees in the center.

Pillar 1: Seamless support

Employees need to have the most simplified and transparent support experience possible. For example, if an employee reports an issue with an app they are using, relevant telemetry needs to be gathered systematically and, if possible, trigger automated workflow tasks to help resolve the problem immediately. By using telemetry from the employee’s device, information about the current application context and other relevant data, the system supplies automated remediation tasks to resolve the issue without agent intervention. If automated remediation isn’t possible, users can engage the Virtual Agent from within the app to help diagnose and resolve the issue and, if unsuccessful, the user can be seamlessly handed off to the most appropriately skilled agent via phone or chat with all the previous steps and telemetry provided on a ticket automatically.

As employees embraced hybrid work, Modern Support reopened walk-in support centers by appointment only and added or transformed some locations to virtual support kiosks with video support capability. These centers, both physical and virtual, use technology for online booking and focus on hardware-related issues to minimize wait time while enabling a seamless environment. Employees are able to book an appointment via the Virtual Agent so the bot can drive self-help solutions before finalizing an appointment. Modern Support remains committed to delivering an experience that anticipates the different ways employees need assistance while providing the flexibility and agility employees now require. The team works diligently to resolve the issue remotely prior to having an employee physically show up to a walk-in center.

Also, a 24-hour exclusive executive support service was designed to quickly resolve technology-related issues for our company’s leadership team and their executive assistants. Executive support services also focus on and identify automation opportunities that can be applied throughout the organization.

Key results

Seamless support investments have produced three key results:

• Employees have more time to focus on their job because issues are automatically identified and remediated transparently on their devices. This means less interaction and time interfacing with support.
• Employees get support anytime, anywhere, and the efficient ticketing process doesn’t require a repetitive description of issues or tedious tasks.
• There has been an increased ratio of successful unassisted support incidents vs. assisted support––from 15 percent to 40 percent.

Pillar 2: High-quality, intuitive knowledge support

At Microsoft, employees are empowered to seek self-remediation methods. Accordingly, investments in the capabilities of the company’s knowledge systems make them easier to use for both employees and support agents. Multiple self-help and virtual-agent modalities driven by powerful search technologies that automatically present to employees accurate, meaningful, and simple-to-follow content help them mitigate issues quickly.

Modern Support is rethinking the company’s knowledge base to improve the experience and increase efficiency for employees and support agents. It includes expanding the scope of knowledge for our self-help tools and Virtual Agent, and driving a set of standards, quality, and best practices for the lifecycle management of knowledge content. Integrating with Microsoft 365 Knowledge Base provides not only issue-tracking capability but also automated support processes and predictive recommendations.

Through a broad partnership across multiple teams, employees can retrieve content from a single-entry point that searches multiple domains transparently, including Bing for Business, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Alchemy, and the traditional support portal. GS&VI resources include a broader range of media types to provide a more optimal support experience. Short, easily consumable, on-demand guidance videos also better support individual content-consumption preferences.

New employee onboarding processes are being improved to ensure employees are prepared for new products and services introduced into their workflow. This also includes new employee onboarding for companies that have been acquired by Microsoft. A complete toolset leveraging Microsoft Viva is now available to new employees to enable them to be more productive on their first day of employment. This is accomplished by unifying onboarding approaches, creating a consolidated content platform, and introducing learning paths based on employee roles and business functions.

Key results

Intuitive knowledge support efforts have produced these key benefits:

• Support content is accessible, simple, easy to follow, and targets a broad reading level and regional context.
• Consumption of support content is tracked and can be correlated to a reduction in employee-initiated support inquiries.
• New employees can more easily find and use knowledge content their first day on the job.
• Employees can easily find and subscribe to high-quality training content that’s relative to the tools and services they use in a variety of media types.

Pillar 3: Unified agent experience

Our support agents and technicians also need the proper toolset to fix issues quickly and support Microsoft employees. To meet this goal, the team is developing and using connected tools and correlated platforms that increase information reuse and employ data pertaining to the support environment. The result will be a seamless experience for both agents and employees.

To improve the agents’ experience, toolsets are being made more intelligent by using machine learning and predictive analytics to enable our agents to access all the information they need to resolve an issue. Telemetry captured on the ticket will drive recommendations and workflows for the agent so they can supply the quickest resolution possible. Intelligent playbooks have also been implemented that automatically present themselves to the agent. These playbooks, based on issue classification, help guide the agent through the troubleshooting process with the employee and ensure a consistent, efficient experience.

Predictive Intelligence allows us to automate many mundane tasks agents must do, such as issue triage and taxonomy management. Tickets are routed to the right team for the first-time using machine learning capabilities, avoiding the need for an agent to review and transfer the task to someone else. This eliminates the waste of time on the ticket lifecycle, thus providing a faster solution for the user. Using Predictive Intelligence, we are also prepopulating taxonomy on behalf of the agent so they can focus on issue resolution and not issue classification.

For tickets created from email or the web and not via our self-help solutions, we are now handing off the management of these tickets to the virtual agent. If a solution is within the scope of the Virtual Agent, then they will proactively reach out to the employees in Microsoft Teams to help on their issue. If successful, the Virtual Agent will manage the update and closure of the ticket. This enables our agents to focus on the most complex problems.

The ticket-resolution toolset gathers robust employee sentiment from chat experiences, call-quality data, and Yammer communities. This information helps agents understand the issues’ complete context and respond more appropriately to the initial employee contact. Agents need to enter the issue-resolution process with the greatest possible chance of success. Employee sentiment also helps Microsoft’s leadership and key stakeholders better understand the issue-resolution process and where intervention might be warranted. The data also helps our product groups and partners to continually improve.

Key results

Unified agent efforts have produced these key benefits:

• A single lens and data repository for the agents. They can manage and interact with tickets from a single location.
• Proactive and predictive support insights. Agents can find and potentially resolve issues before they’re reported by employees.
• Enhanced automated-support capabilities. Automation-assisted mitigation actions expedite resolution of technical issues.
• Automated ticket management and resolution via the Virtual Agent for simple issues.

Pillar 4: Infrastructure and site-services excellence

Aligned with our vision for hybrid workplaces, which enable our people to be connected, engaged, and productive wherever they are, Modern Support field-based teams drive the deployment and operation of innovative technologies and services for over 790 buildings in 110 countries. Modern Support teams are digitalizing on-site experiences and enabling physical spaces as a strategic tool to reenergize our workforce, maintain engagement, and attract and retain the best talent.

Hybrid work is driving significant realignment of how we utilize our physical spaces worldwide, impacting key infrastructure related to collaboration, connectivity, and security. In response to this demand, our infrastructure and AV deployment teams have implemented robust global technology standards to maximize value and drive consistent experiences for our global user base. Unifying data sets such as building occupancy and incident volume with historic project delivery data (including cost, scheduling, and deviations) yields critical insights to support ongoing investment prioritization. Combined with data collected during each project delivery phase (deployment, provisioning timelines, and associated costs), we are able to drive reductions in total cost of ownership and increased overall return on investment through enhanced planning and delivery processes.

One consequence of the shift to hybrid work has been increased demand for richer meeting room experiences that better accommodate remote and in-person participants. To support this demand, Modern Support teams are deploying new Microsoft Teams-powered hybrid meeting room technology across our 14,000 AV-enabled conference rooms worldwide. Bringing remote attendees “into the room” is moving us closer to parity of experience for those attending outside the office.

Key to enabling our vision of digitalizing on-site experiences and empowering our field-based teams is a focus on unifying existing data sources to allow critical insights around workplace experience health. Using infrastructure telemetry (such as network, AV, and environmental (IoT)) to corroborate employee sentiment, captured through both surveys and dynamic sentiment analysis, enables a holistic view of employee experiences in our physical spaces. This data-driven approach has allowed us to introduce the concept of a franchise model to empower Field IT Managers to be fully accountable for services delivered within their geographic scope and effectively drive experience improvement activities.

As we look to embrace the opportunities presented by automation and AI, we are deploying services such as “Just in Time” (JIT) cable room access alongside AI-driven “Computer Vision” solutions to monitor the critical infrastructure hosted in over 1,200 cable rooms globally. Doing this enables us to automate change management processes and ensure physical security for crucial infrastructure components at our sites across the globe. Enriching our CMDB (Configuration Management Data Base) capabilities with these and other new data sources has been key to automating Device Lifecycle Management (DLM) processes across our estate.

Through our continued focus on digitalizing the delivery of our critical on-site experiences, we can optimize support costs while driving employee satisfaction and productivity, aligning with our mission to transform the employee support journey at Microsoft.

Key results

Infrastructure and site-services efforts have produced these key benefits:

• All infrastructure projects are delivered on time, on budget, and within standards or with approved deviations.
• Alert monitoring is on all meeting room assets and site infrastructure (network, IoT) to increase proactive issue detection.
• Customer satisfaction metrics for Modern Support services are met or exceeded at the geographic and site level.

Modern support experience benefits

The Modern Support experience at Microsoft is transforming the way employees and agents experience and provide support across the company. This environment enables employees to be creative, innovative, and productive by providing a support experience that focuses on identifying and remediating issues automatically—before employees are even aware they exist. By creating a seamless support experience, creating high-quality knowledge content, supplying a unified agent experience, and maintaining infrastructure and site-services excellence, employees’ support interactions are greatly improving. This Modern Support experience gives everyone at Microsoft broad, inclusive access that enables employees to do more with less and empowers every person and every organization to achieve more.

Here are tips you can try as you work to transform your support experience at your company:

• Take a vision-led and phased approach when modernizing your support experience.
• Place greater emphasis on the employee experience when measuring your service level support metrics.
• Increase employee productivity by detecting and remediating issues proactively before your employees report them.
• Invest in seamless, in-context support and simple, intuitive knowledge systems to improve employee experience and efficiency.
• Establish a listening system across the organization that can engage with your local stakeholders and employees and be accountable for support services and experience.

• Learn more about how we’re using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance our end-user support.
• Find out how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a hybrid world.
• See how we’re transforming enterprise collaboration internally here at Microsoft.

The post Enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The result?

Content that previously took the company days or weeks to deliver can now be published in minutes.

Microsoft SupplierWeb is a centralized account management tool for global suppliers who do business with Microsoft. This portal is where suppliers go to stay up to date on important information, such as compliance expectations and certification requirements. SupplierWeb is also how Microsoft communicates critical announcements that impact daily activities, such as COVID-19 updates and changes to expectations for onsite presence.

“Historically, we’ve had a really difficult time getting information to our suppliers,” says Jesica Lancaster, a senior operations manager on Microsoft’s Procurement team.

Publishing content for a global audience was a time-consuming process that required a coordinated effort with the engineering team for every new message or announcement posted to the portal. This created two problems: it took time away from engineering tasks and delayed necessary communication to suppliers.

All we needed was a way to securely connect the apps.

—Wilson Reddy Gajarla, principal engineering manager, Commerce and Ecosystem team

That’s where the Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystem team comes in—it’s the organization at the company that supports the SupplierWeb application, and it had the tools needed to solve both challenges.

[Find out how Microsoft streamlined payment processes with Power Automate. Learn how to access SharePoint content using Graph API.]

Integrating collaboration tools to maximize workflow

The content managers who use the Microsoft SupplierWeb application to reach supplier audiences relied on Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to collaborate and create the appropriate messaging. The opportunity was to use Microsoft Power Automate to manage the manual and repetitive tasks required to do this work.

“All we needed was a way to securely connect the apps,” says Wilson Reddy Gajarla, a principal engineering manager for the Commerce and Ecosystem team.

By using Microsoft Graph API, a RESTful web API that enables access to Microsoft Cloud services, the engineering team set permissions to connect Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Power Automate.

“Graph API has granular-level permission to access the SharePoint Online site, which allows secure integration with other enterprise applications,” Gajarla says.

Once an app is registered with Graph API, you can set permissions to allow web applications—in this case, Microsoft Power Automate—to access Microsoft SharePoint content.

After the initial setup is done, content managers can simply craft a message, add it to a Microsoft SharePoint list, and use Microsoft Power Automate to publish supplier content in up to 24 different languages, all without having to involve the engineering team.

Creating better outcomes with Microsoft Power Automate

Integrating collaboration tools opened a whole new world for content managers, product managers, and business partners. With Microsoft Power Automate handling the repetitive but essential tasks, Microsoft saw the following benefits:

• Content managers are no longer reliant on engineering schedules to communicate with suppliers and can respond to business needs in real time.
• Engineering time is no longer needed for repetitive, manual work, which allows engineers to focus on high-value engineering tasks.
• Business costs are reduced through a more efficient, automated process.
• Suppliers benefit from timely communication in their selected language.

The shift to Microsoft Power Automate has given teams other tools to work with as well.

With Power Automate, we have the ability to reach our audience and move at the speed of business.

—Jesica Lancaster, senior operations manager, Microsoft Procurement

Content managers can publish critical messages instantly, or they can use Microsoft Power Automate to craft future announcements, set a start and end date, and set the level of urgency based on region. Microsoft Power Automate also provides a framework that enables content managers to keep messaging current and relevant to the intended audience. That’s pivotal when it comes to getting messaging out to the company’s many suppliers.

“With Power Automate, we have the ability to reach our audience and move at the speed of business,” Lancaster says.

We leveraged Microsoft technology to automate the end-to-end flow and created business efficiencies that allow people to focus on work, not processes.

—Ashish Sayal, principal engineering manager, Commerce and Ecosystem team

In addition, Microsoft Power Automate’s ability to automatically translate content into multiple languages eliminates the need to engage translation services and ensures that the message will be conveyed clearly to a global audience.

Microsoft’s new paradigm in supplier content management

Managing supplier content was once a clunky and time-consuming operation that required significant resources for every message, and often resulted in delayed communication for vendors.

“We leveraged Microsoft technology to automate the end-to-end flow and created business efficiencies that allow people to focus on work, not processes,” says Ashish Sayal, a principal engineering manager for the Commerce and Ecosystem team. Automating repetitive, manual tasks reduced the workload, lowered operational costs, and increased consistency and reliability of Microsoft’s messaging.

Connecting and communicating with a global network of vendors is still an enormous undertaking, but by integrating Power Automate into the workflow, the Commerce and Ecosystem team transformed supplier content management into an agile, dynamic process that can move at the speed of business.

Here are five things you can do to get started with Microsoft Power Automate:

• Install Microsoft 360 and Microsoft Azure Active Directory.
• Register with Microsoft Graph API.
• Create a Microsoft Power Automate account.
• Set the appropriate permissions with Microsoft Graph API.
• Start generating content on via Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Teams.

• Learn how to access SharePoint content using Graph API.
• Find out how Microsoft streamlined payment processes with Power Automate.

The post Rethinking supplier content at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Automate 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.

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.

“Specialists are solution sellers,” says Schlegel, a data and AI specialist for Microsoft Digital Sales. “We help customers solve problems with an eye toward helping them move down the path of digital transformation. To do this, we also must develop high-quality relationships with them.”

Schlegel introduces customers to Microsoft technologies that can help them efficiently address their business needs. He says that he and other solution seller specialists can identify opportunities for sales based on customer purchase history, Microsoft Azure consumption levels, and workload usage.

However, it can be challenging for Microsoft sellers to holistically understand their customers because of the company’s scale and the broad set of rich products it offers to customers.

“I could do this manually, but it would consume most of my time,” Schlegel says. “If a tool gives me recommendations, I could spend more time with the customer.”

Enter Daily Recommender, an internal AI solution that uses Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure, and an AI interface to provide data-driven recommendations to sellers based on over 1,000 data points per customer, including past purchases, marketing engagement, and digital and local event attendance.

“A lot of companies invest in AI solutions,” says Praveen Kumar, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital. “The primary differentiator is that Daily Recommender presents specialists and account executives with meaningful data, insights, and artifacts so they can make the right decisions.”

[Learn more about how Microsoft Digital developed Daily Recommender. Learn how Microsoft Digital modernized the toolset Microsoft sellers use.]

Scoping customer conversations based on past engagements

Daily Recommender uses internal and external data points such as current consumption levels, licenses, customer interactions with marketing material, and machine learning techniques such as collaborative filtering and natural language processing to identify the next logical product recommendation for the customer.

“We help customers achieve the solutions they intend to build in the most efficient way using Microsoft technologies,” says Siddharth Kumar, a principal machine learning scientist manager who works on the team that provides machine learning solutions to Daily Recommender. “With these curated recommendations, sellers can spend less time creating sales pitches and focus on having meaningful and useful discussions with customers.”

These recommendations and insights are presented in a curated dashboard, which is available to the entire Digital Sales team.

“Let’s say a Microsoft account team is responsible for over 100 customers,” says Salman Mukhtar, the director of business programs for the Digital Sales team. “Daily Recommender gives you access to product recommendations for the accounts across your solution areas. The app also provides a rationale for the recommendation, what material you can use, and a suggested action date. It takes the AI to the last mile.”

Using Daily Recommender, account executives and specialists work together to understand what may be top of mind for the customer, review product recommendations, identify the right customer contacts, and provide customer-centric recommendations based on the customer’s needs and interests.

For example, say a customer downloaded a piece of Microsoft content showcasing how to move legacy SQL servers to the cloud. Daily Recommender could prompt a specialist to provide that customer with resources for cloud migration and suggest that they unlock the advanced capabilities of the cloud by investing in a business intelligence tool like Microsoft Power BI.

“Within minutes, I have a clear picture of what’s currently driving the customer and how I can structure my conversations based on their current consumption and interest in Microsoft products,” says Alexander Mildner, an account executive for Microsoft Digital Sales. “If I had this two and a half years ago, my life would have been easier.”

Equipped with this data, sellers and account executives can collaborate and connect customers with Microsoft resources, products, and specialists to achieve their projects’ goals. Specialists can work with customers to create execution plans or discuss the technical details of implementation, often within their area of expertise.

“Collaboration is an essential part of an account team,” Mildner says. “The more insights you can use as a specialist or account executive, the better.”

Committing to continuous improvement over time

With Daily Recommender, one out of every three recommendations qualifies as a sales opportunity. This is almost four times higher than the industry average of 6 to 10 percent. The app becomes more intelligent over time as it continues to learn from seller actions and sales outcomes. The team also takes a hands-on approach to improving Daily Recommender by analyzing clickthrough and seller action data and soliciting feedback through in-person roadshows, emails, and community calls.

“I think we will look back in a year or two, and we won’t be able to imagine a time before this tool,” Mildner says. “I’ve already seen the progress that the tool has made in the past two years, which tells you how strong its AI is.”

Daily Recommender was built for the Microsoft Sales team by Microsoft Digital as part of an ongoing effort to transform the tools and processes that the company provides for its sales force.

“For a sales model that requires sellers to do active prospecting at scale, we needed a robust and AI enabled solution that would help sellers quickly identify and actively engage with the customers to make faster buying decisions,” says Hyma Davuluri, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital. “This led to the development of Daily Recommender, which enabled sellers to identify and act on sales opportunities.”

The journey to create and improve Daily Recommender has been educational for Mukhtar and the team. They have learned that the best way to improve the experience is to create synergy across business groups, sellers, and AI experts.

The result?

The Digital Sales team was able to transform the sales process with AI.

Mukhtar says that supporting this collaboration took time, but it started with bringing people together to invest in changing the way the Microsoft sales teams organized and approached their customers for prospecting new business.

“Changing people’s behavior isn’t easy,” Mukhtar says. “We focused on bringing together different stakeholders to invest in changing our processes. We found that value is really unlocked by how well you bring together AI and the sales process, seller behavior, and customer needs and integrate into a modern app.”

• Learn more about how we developed Daily Recommender.
• Learn how we modernized our seller’s toolset.

The post Transforming sales at Microsoft with AI-infused recommendations and customer insights appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Just ask the 25,000 people who pitch the complex array of products and services that the company sells to customers across the globe.

Those sellers used to wade through more than 30 homegrown applications to get their jobs done, often spending more time filling out forms and cross referencing tools than talking to customers.

“We needed to modernize our toolset,” says Kim Kunes, who leads the Microsoft Digital team that provides the tools and experiences that the sales and marketing organizations use to sell the company’s wares. “We needed to turn what had been our sellers’ biggest headache into an asset that would help them flourish in a connected, cloud world.”

A complete overhaul of the company’s tools and processes is fully underway, says Kunes, but it’s not complete.

“We’ve winnowed a disconnected, heavily seamed group of tools down to a core group of critical experiences connected in ways that make sense for our sellers and marketers, but there is still work to do,” she says. “We’re in year two of a multiyear journey to revamp our sellers’ toolset.”

Kunes says her team, like all of Microsoft Digital, is shifting its focus from working for internal partners in a traditional IT manner to building experiences in partnership with the business that make sense for users. In this case, those users are the heart and soul of the company’s revenue-generating selling community.

“Now, just like any other product team at Microsoft, we operate with a baseline budget that funds a group of FTE (full-time employee) engineers and a continuous prioritization and planning process to deliver functionality most critical to our users and businesses,” she says. “Now we’re thinking, ‘What should the seller experience be from start to finish? Are we doing everything we can to make their experience as seamless as possible?’”

This transformation has Microsoft Digital’s Commercial Sales and Marketing Engineering Team working in new ways. It’s centralizing and standardizing the many channels of feedback and data to derive a picture of users’ unmet, unarticulated needs. The shift is built around a new focus on how Microsoft Digital approaches customer research. It’s adopting a fluent, modern look and feel that’s consistent with how the rest of the Microsoft is approaching design. It’s using DevOps and other agile engineering principles that truly keep the team focused on the user’s end-to-end experience as it moves, fast and flexibly.

“All of our sellers’ regular tasks need to be in one place and arranged so that it’s efficient and virtually seamless to flow through them,” Kunes says. “Everything has to be intuitive. There should be no big learning curves. They shouldn’t have to figure out how to use a new application every time they want to get something done.”

This laser focus on the customer experience has required the team to think and work differently.

“I’ve seen our team’s culture shift,” Kunes says. “In the past we were focused on incremental improvements to make the process and tools better. Now we’re thinking bigger. For example, we’re beginning to use AI and machine learning to curate the gold mine of valuable data we have to surface critical next best action insights to our sellers and marketers.”

This transformation is driving results that are paying dividends, says Siew Hoon Goh, the Microsoft director of sales excellence in charge of making sure the tools and experience that Microsoft Digital is building meet the needs of the company’s digital sales force.

“Our sellers do recognize that there has been lots of progress,” Goh says. “Technology is one of the best enablers for us to scale to bigger and better things and increased revenue for the company.”

Microsoft’s umbrella tool for sales is Microsoft Sales Experience. Known as MSX, it’s an integrated solution built on Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure products, Office 365 productivity and collaboration services, and Power BI. In July, MSX was upgraded to the new modern Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales user experience. It includes a simplified user experience and integration into LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, and several internal tools.

“Our MSX instance is one of the largest implementations of Dynamics 365 in the company,” says Ismail Mohammed, a principal program manager on the Microsoft Digital team working to make life better for the company’s sales field. “Ultimately, we want to make our tools more intuitive and help our sellers get their time back so they can focus more of their time on selling.”

MSX is the gateway to several important seller experiences that you’ll read about here:

• Portal, a second generation of MSX meant to be a true single pane of glass for sellers to work from
• Account Based Marketing, a transformed approach to sifting through marketing sales leads to find the ones that are worth pursuing
• Daily Recommender, a machine learning-based discovery engine that advises sellers on the specific leads they should pursue next
• Account 360, an aggregated view of customer content that helps sellers find the right customer information before they reach out to leads

Charting the evolution of MSX

When MSX launched in 2015, it replaced eight on-premises instances of Dynamics CRM 2011, each of which was highly customized and complex. Built on Azure Cloud Services, MSX brought all those experiences into one cloud-based platform.

Though it was a big improvement, it was still just a beginning.

“For perspective, MSX started out as a collection of links,” Kunes says. “It was nice to have a place where you could get to everything, but it really wasn’t the seamless, single-pane-of-glass experience that we are working toward.”

The team has continued to refine MSX, pushing hard to evolve it into an experience in which sellers feel more productive. They felt less so when they pieced their sales story together with their own offline Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and secret contact lists (the latter of which are no longer allowed anyway, because of GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation).

The original MSX solution is gradually making way for MSX Portal, a new, transformative experience that is being rolled out to the company’s sellers role by role, says Steffie Hofmann, Microsoft Digital’s lead MSX Portal program manager. MSX Portal debuted in February, when the experience was provided to the company’s customer-success managers, a specialized sales role at Microsoft.

MSX Portal helps sellers figure out what the next best action they can take. They get suggestions on their homepage and in context-driven ways within their workflow.

“Each time we ship MSX Portal to a new group of sellers, the experience improves dramatically,” Hofmann says. “They no longer have to leave the tool to get their work done.”

The goal has long been to have MSX provide sellers everything they need as they reach out to customers to sell the company on a daily basis , says Steve Thomas, Microsoft Digital’s lead software engineering manager for MSX Portal.

“We built MSX Portal with the idea of making it a great place for our sellers to start their day, to get their work done,” Thomas says. “We wanted to get past the notion that it was something they had to work around.”

The rollout of MSX Portal is expected to be complete by the end of the 2019 calendar year.

Sifting through the noise

Sales leads pour into a company the size of Microsoft from all directions, at massive scale. After their interest gets piqued by the company’s wide-ranging marketing efforts, leaders at other businesses watch webinars and make decisions:

• Should CIOs invest in Microsoft’s stack?
• Should CEOs ask Microsoft to see how the company can help them digitally transform?
• Should IT pros ask for Microsoft’s help via product websites and customer-service lines and at conferences?

[Read this case study on how Microsoft uses a bot to improve basic lead qualification to see how millions of potential sales leads received each year are qualified down to thousands. Read about how we use AI to serve up the next best lead to sellers.]

All those many thousands of leads get funneled into the Microsoft Global Demand Center.

“Before we move a lead to one of our sellers, we nurture them in the Global Demand Center,” says Prabhu Jayaraman, a group engineering manager who helps lead Microsoft Digital’s marketing effort. “They don’t go to our sellers right away—first we need to make sure our leads are high quality and have a high propensity to result in wins before we transfer them.”

It used to be that all those marketing-driven leads would get dumped on sellers, tossed over the fence with little vetting or insight.

“Sellers would look at these queues, they’d see 25 pages of leads, and randomly say, ‘This looks interesting, let me go talk to them,’” Jayaraman says. “The problem was the lead they picked out of the 10,000 options might not be the next best lead to pick.”

To help sellers get to the right lead, Microsoft adopted a new approach to how it markets to larger customers by infusing AI into its Account Based Marketing (ABM) program.

“ABM is not a tool, it’s a concept,” Jayaraman says. “It’s about stitching these opportunities together in ways that make sense—when one company contacts us in five different ways, we will connect those together into one opportunity.”

To Vinh Nguyen, ABM is about bringing marketing and sales closer together—something it does by weaving relevant contacts and insights together in ways that help sellers be more effective.

“It may sound simple, but it hasn’t been,” says Nguyen, the senior program manager leading Microsoft Digital’s efforts around Account Based Marketing. “We’re trying to use machine learning and automation to optimize when sellers should engage with a customer on products that their employees have shown interest in.”

The team has been working for more than a year on getting it right.

“We’re using Marketo marketing software to listen to our customer interaction signals,” Nguyen says. “When signals come into the Global Demand Center, we feed them into our machine-learning models.”

Those ML model-fueled recommendations are fed into the Daily Recommender, where sellers use them to decide which leads to pursue on a daily basis.

Finding the best leads with Daily Recommender

Until recently, Microsoft’s most successful sellers were those best at finding gold nuggets of customer information hidden in the company’s many sales tools. That was when star sellers were known for maintaining their own offline databases and sales pitches more than they were for building close relationships with customers.

“Why should our most successful sellers be the ones who are the best at navigating complex systems?” Kunes says. “Why shouldn’t success be about having intelligent, human connections with customers?”

This culture was fed by the fact that the company’s sales strategy was built around educated guesswork—each quarter, SWAT team-like groups of sellers would gather, discuss the indicators that each of them were seeing, talk it out, and use that war-room discussion to set sales targets for the upcoming quarter.

All of this made selling more art than science.

The team looked to change that when it developed Daily Recommender, a machine-learning tool that makes individualized recommendations for each seller, says Hyma Davuluri, principal program manager in Microsoft Digital.

“With Daily Recommender, we’re pushing the envelope on using AI to influence large-scale selling at Microsoft,” Davuluri says. “It’s also helping us accelerate our digital transformation journey across the company’s sales organization.”

Launched three years ago, Daily Recommender has been rolled out to about 1,000 sellers and, as it has learned and matured, is starting to show very promising results. So says Salman Mukhtar, the director of business programs who leads the selling community’s use of Daily Recommender.

“It’s Microsoft using Microsoft,” Mukhtar says. “We’re using SQL Server, Azure Fabric, Azure Machine Learning—we’re using a lot of our own technology together and connecting it on top of Dynamics.”

Microsoft started small with the intent to prove the value of an AI-enabled discovery engine that would improve targeting of new business while reducing the preparation efforts by sellers. So far, the results have been promising—one in four recommendations pursued by sellers result in a customer opportunity or engagement.

“Machine-to-human AI requires a mindset change,” Mukhtar says. “It requires legacy processes to be enhanced and new habits to be formed across the sales force.”

For example, sellers must give up their personalized Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks. “The sponsors and developers of our legacy toolkits and processes need to be bold and decommission where necessary,” he says.

The needed changes are happening but are not complete yet.

“Digital transformation is a journey—for us it involves data, tools, processes, and people all enabled by AI,” Mukhtar says. “We are scaling up our enablement efforts to transform Daily Recommender into the primary discovery engine for the business.”

Account 360 stitches the customer story together

Historically, it has been a challenge for sellers, as they reach out, to understand what relationship a customer has with Microsoft.

“The key challenge for sellers was to gather consistent insights in order to have a productive conversation,” says Alioscha Leon, Microsoft Digital’s program manager for Account 360, a new MSX sales tool that seeks to stamp out that legacy of opaqueness. “They would have to go to several tools with different interfaces and search functionality in order to get the information required to have a productive conversation, and there still was no guarantee that they were getting the full picture.”

To change that, Microsoft Digital rolled out Account 360 in May 2019.

It was introduced in beta form to an initial wave of sellers from Microsoft Inside Sales. Built into MSX Portal, it aggregates multiple tools into one, with a consistent user interface, giving sellers a comprehensive view of their customers. More than 1,300 sellers volunteered to try out the tool, exceeding the goal of 800.

“We allow sellers to very quickly prepare for an interaction with a customer,” Leon says. “We’re making it easy for them to have relevant conversations without having to do huge amounts of research, increasing the seller productivity and interaction quality.”

Account 360 allows sellers to see Microsoft’s agreements across modern and legacy systems, revenue across products, marketing interactions, partner association, and account profiles. It also shows what opportunities and leads are already being pursued, and what products and services the customer is already consuming. The insights are available and delivered in a fast and consistent manner, using an interface tailor made for sellers.

The goal is for the sellers to get all the info they need to enable a productive customer interaction in the Account 360 interface. But if they need to go deeper, a linking strategy allows them to navigate to additional resources.

A first version of Account 360 went live in July for all seller audiences. “We continue to have exponential growth in both monthly and weekly unique users, with 3,000 unique monthly users and a run rate of 1,300 weekly unique users in August,” Leon says.

Dynamics 365 is the backbone of selling at Microsoft

MSX’s heavy use of the Dynamics 365 platform is very helpful, says Linda Simovic, principal group program manager for the Dynamics 365 product group.

“I think the way we’re drinking our own champagne inside the company is amazing,” Simovic says. “With 25,000 sellers or more in the company, it gives us a lot of great ways to test out our products and services.”

Showcasing the way Microsoft uses Dynamics 365 products also helps other companies understand what they can do with the platform, she says.

Simovic says the Dynamics team continuously talks with the Microsoft selling community and Microsoft Digital, weaving their steady stream of feedback into Dynamics 365 as fully and quickly as possible.

“We actually say to the MSX team, ‘We’re thinking about building this—what do you think?’” she says. “We want them to use it and to let us know if it works. It’s a litmus test to see if what we’re thinking is a good idea or not.”

The recent decision to upgrade MSX to the latest version of Dynamics 365 helps with this—now the Microsoft Digital team can try out new features as soon as they’re ready for testing.

“We want to be able to cover their needs out of the box as much as possible,” Simovic says. “The better we can support the company’s complex sales motion, the better we can support our external customers.”

Mohammed agrees, calling out how the two teams have worked together to bring new enterprise-level capabilities into Dynamics 365.

In fact, he says, the teams are working so closely together that in some cases the Microsoft Digital Commercial Sales and Marketing Engineering Team is co-developing directly with the Dynamics team to add features that the sales teams need.

“That’s a big change from our historical approach of building in-house bridge software,” Mohammed says. “This is a pretty major leap forward for us—we’re working hand-in-hand with the product group to build new capabilities for customers.”

For Kunes and her Microsoft Digital team, the successful partnership with Dynamics is just one more signal that their new, transformed approach to supporting the company’s complex sales motion is working.

“We’ve laid the groundwork for us to finally get this right for our sellers,” Kunes says. “Now we just need to go finish what we started. It’s an exciting time to be working on this team.”

• Read this case study on how Microsoft uses a bot to improve basic lead qualification to see how millions of potential sales leads received each year are qualified down to thousands.
• Read about how we use AI to serve up the next best lead to sellers.

The post Retooling how Microsoft sellers sell the company appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Both are part of being a good steward of the environment, says Elizabeth Willmott, carbon program manager at Microsoft, but they are only a beginning. There is a much bigger opportunity within reach.

“Microsoft is in a unique position with its enormous network of customers, partners, and suppliers,” Willmott says. “We have an incredible reach with our software and services, and with our devices. If we can use that reach to drive positive change for the environment, then we can really start to help the planet.”

[Read this case study on how Microsoft is using machine learning to minimize its carbon footprint and reduce its energy consumption.]

Employees are asking about and encouraging Microsoft’s efforts all the time, and the company’s leaders are also pushing to find ways to do more.

“This is definitely a year when we’re on the move in terms of doing a lot more on sustainability,” says Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, speaking to company employees at a recent internal event. “It starts with getting our house in order, but then it ultimately connects to how we can help everyone on the planet use technology to drive sustainability goals.”

To mitigate its impact on the climate, the company’s efforts have been in three main areas: decreasing its carbon emissions through energy efficiency and conservation; moving to renewable energy for its datacenters and buildings; and offsetting the carbon emissions of business air travel.

“We’re on a leadership path in these areas,” Willmott says. “Now we are leaning in to encourage and help our suppliers, our partners, and our customers to do the same.”

Levying a tax for good

Microsoft charges internal teams a tax of $15 per metric ton on all operational carbon emissions, a fee that just went up from the approximately $8 per metric ton charged previously. The money is paid into a sustainability fund that is used to achieve carbon neutrality via efficiency, renewable energy, and offsets. From there it is granted to Microsoft internal teams and external organizations to address climate change and other environmental sustainability priorities. This process is transparent, and the investment areas are tracked publicly on Microsoft’s Sustainability Fund Power BI Dashboard.

Among those investments to accelerate progress is Microsoft’s AI for Earth program, a commitment by Microsoft to spend $50 million over five years to support projects that use Microsoft’s AI and machine-learning technology to tackle environmental challenges, says Bonnie Lei, AI for Earth program manager at Microsoft.

“We’re supporting individuals and organizations that are building AI models that are broadly useful for the environment,” Lei says. “We want to provide exponential impact with our investment, and so we work with our partners to make these models available on the AI for Earth website to the wider public.”

For example, Microsoft is supporting SilviaTerra, a California company that is using an AI for Earth grant to create a national forest inventory, which is now being piloted in an effort to help people who own small private forest land receive payment for keeping that land forested.

“They created machine-learning algorithms that were scaled through Microsoft Azure to create the first map of every single tree in every forest in the continental US, down to the tree’s species and size,” Lei says.

Landowners can use those maps to better manage their land, and, more importantly, they are testing a new approach to qualify their lands as viable carbon offsets. This means that, for the first time, these owners can be paid to keep their land forested by companies looking to offset their carbon emissions.

“Previously, they were not able to enter the carbon market due to the high cost of overhead and monitoring,” Lei says. “Now they have more incentive and a way to value keeping their forest stands standing.”

Landowners are also leveraging the maps to improve how they manage their land, including better preparing themselves for fire danger and drought.

Easing the environmental cost of buildings

One of the core ways Microsoft aims to reduce its carbon footprint is by transforming how it constructs and manages its buildings.

The company is currently rebuilding part of its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and it’s seeking to do so in ways that slash the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere that is typical of new construction, says Katie Ross, global sustainability program manager for Microsoft Real Estate and Security.

“Traditionally, the building sector has been focused on operational carbon,” says Ross, referring to the carbon associated with the energy used to run a building. “But that’s only half of the carbon problem in the building sector—the other half is embodied carbon, or the carbon that is emitted when building materials are manufactured.”

Think about the latter as “upfront carbon.”

“It’s the carbon you expend before you even flip the switch to turn on the building,” Ross says.

Unlike operational carbon, which you can reduce to zero over the life of the building by implementing energy-efficiency programs and by sourcing renewable energy, embodied carbon was emitted to make that concrete—to pull the raw materials out of the ground, to process them, and so on.

“That’s a carbon footprint number you can only reduce when you pick the material, and once the building is built, you cannot change it,” Ross says.

Microsoft is constructing 17 new buildings on its east campus—a total of 2.5 million square feet of new space.

“We knew we wanted to tackle both sides of the carbon equation, with the aim to build zero-carbon buildings,” Ross says. “To get there, we’re focusing on reducing our energy usage, we’re sourcing 100-percent carbon-free electricity, we’re removing natural gas—including for cooking—in our cafes, and we’re using a new tool, Embodied Carbon Calculator for Construction (EC3), to track and reduce our embodied carbon.”

Microsoft is partnering with the University of Washington’s Carbon Leadership Forum and the global project-development and construction company Skanska to pilot EC3 on its new campus. This open-source, free-to-use tool is helping the Microsoft Real Estate and Security construction team assess the embodied carbon within construction materials it considers for the project.

“A lot of this is unchartered territory,” Ross says.

Efforts by corporations to track and reduce the embodied carbon impact of their buildings are in their infancy, she says.

“So far we are on target to reduce our embodied carbon emissions by 15 to 30 percent,” she says. “We are learning a lot about what’s possible by piloting this tool and hope to create a roadmap to support the industry targeting embodied carbon reductions in future projects.”

Energy and airplanes

Willmott says that one of the most notable ways Microsoft has made an impact on the environmental sustainability side is by procuring renewable energy to power the company’s datacenters.

So far, Microsoft has procured enough renewable energy to power 60 percent of its datacenter load by the end of this calendar year. The goal is to continue on a path to power 100 percent of its datacenters with renewable energy.

One area the company is exploring to further shift behavior and reduce carbon emissions is by encouraging employees to skip carbon-intensive airline trips in favor of using Microsoft Teams to meet and collaborate.

When employees do fly, Microsoft offsets the associated emissions by investing in verified carbon-offset projects, such as a first-of-its-kind forest conservation project in King County, Washington. The company’s environmental sustainability team vets all offset projects closely to ensure that they are having a measurable impact.

“These investments have supported the protection of 5.1 million acres of sensitive land worldwide,” Willmott says. But even though scaling up the impact of these “natural climate solutions” investments is meaningful, the team is very aware that avoiding carbon emissions altogether is the first and best line of action.

It’s all part of Microsoft’s commitment to sustainability, Willmott says.

“We’re using Microsoft tools and purchasing decisions to prove what our research has told us—that AI and other technologies can help usher in a low-carbon transition and protect the planet from catastrophic degradation,” she says.

If there were significantly greater adoption of AI in key sectors, greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced enough to zero out the annual emissions of Australia, Canada, and Japan combined.

“There is so much we can do if we all work together on this,” Willmott says. “Let’s go do this.”

Read this case study on creating business intelligence with Azure SQL Database and this case study on using machine learning to develop smart energy solutions to see how Microsoft is using technology to minimize its building footprint and reduce its energy consumption.

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