The AI revolution is here, so what are you going to do about it?

This question is for IT leaders, IT practitioners, and others out there who need to decide how your companies will respond to the onslaught of AI products and solutions that are coming your way!

We had the same question here at Microsoft, and to make sure we responded in the right way, we—Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization—created an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to guide us.

Here’s the story of how we did that and how our CoE is now helping us navigate the AI revolution and figure out how to deploy it internally across Microsoft.  

Evaluating AI for Microsoft

For us, it started with evaluating what our people want from AI.

Next-generation AI is transformative, and as it does for all enterprises, it presents a huge opportunity for us at Microsoft. One of the fundamental steps our CoE is taking is to accept this and not get in the way. We’re encouraging a culture of disruption while also living up to our obligation to do so responsibly.

We know that integrating AI into everything we do will never be a matter of stitching AI features or capabilities into our existing systems and processes, but rather a process of reexamining how we do things. We want it to do three important things—amplify human ingenuity, deliver transformative experiences, and safeguard our people, business, and data.

Our CoE encourages our teams to think about how AI can help their work and to rethink their work with AI in mind. To respond adequately to this AI revolution, we took a holistic view of how each of our employees can achieve their full potential and how each team, department, and the entire organization can benefit from AI.

“Getting AI right is about empowering your people to do their best work,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal program manager architect in Microsoft Digital and one of the leaders of our CoE. “We’re off to a good start—now that we’re underway, we’re laser focused on making sure everything that we do empowers our employees be their best, most creative, selves while also protecting them and the company as well.”

Meeting needs and answering important questions

We’re using feedback from our employees and leaders to guide how we invest in AI.

Our employees are telling us they want to simplify and offload mundane tasks and focus on productive, creative work. They view AI as a tool to find information and answers, summarize meetings and action items, perform administrative tasks, and plan their day. However, their focus is on more than administration and tedium. Employees also want to use AI to improve and inform their creative work and enable them to produce deeper and more insightful analytical work.

Drilling down, we asked our employees for specifics on what they want out of AI to improve the experience they have at work.

What employees want from AI

Our leaders want AI to empower employees, not replace them.

Leaders want AI to create an environment for employees that increases their productivity, improves their well-being, decreases the time they spend on low-value activities, and improves their skills.

“We want to empower employees to find time for more innovative and rewarding work,” Krishnamurthy says.

What leaders want from AI

Transforming Microsoft with the AI Center of Excellence

Now that we’ve shared how our CoE is listening to our employees and leaders, we’ll share more detail on the CoE itself.

Our AI CoE team is comprised of experts across Microsoft in various fields, including data science, machine learning, business intelligence development, product development, experience design and research, accessibility, and program management.

Working under the AI 4 ALL (Accelerate, Learn, and Land) tagline, the team is responsible for planning, designing, implementing, and championing how we use AI internally at Microsoft.

Our CoE uses these pillars to guide their work:

• Strategy. They work with product and feature teams to determine what we want to achieve with AI. They define business goals and prioritize the most important implementations and investments.
• Architecture. They enable infrastructure, data, services, security, privacy, scalability, accessibility, and interoperability for all our AI use cases.
• Roadmap. They build and manage implementation plans for all our AI projects, including tools, technologies, responsibilities, targets, and performance measurement.
• Culture. They foster collaboration, innovation, education, and responsible AI among our stakeholders.

“These pillars are helping us stay focused on the right things,” Krishnamurthy says. “It’s about using AI to grow and nourish a culture of innovation and excellence across the company.”

Strategy

Our CoE Strategy team evaluates what we’re doing with AI at Microsoft. The most fundamental perspective for the strategy pillar is examining AI as a catalyst for transforming our tools and processes, not as an addition or augmentation to existing tools and processes. While AI is designed to augment and improve human capabilities, it can’t be approached as only an augmentation or improvement to the tools and processes we use. We must be willing to start over if that achieves the best outcome for our employees and business.

From the beginning, the strategy team examined the projects and business goals through positive disruption—a willingness to refine each idea to its core. To capture the full value of AI in our organization, we knocked down boundaries. We examined every one of our business processes, reimagining them and how AI could improve them, often in revolutionary ways.

Our strategy is driven from the organization’s top level, and executive sponsorship is crucial to executing our implementation well. When our transformation mandate comes from the organization’s leader, it resonates in every corner of the organization, every piece of work, and every task that could be changed.  Simultaneously, we have encouraged and welcomed ideas from every level of the organization, empowering individuals from across our organization to contribute their AI insights.

We’re moving quickly, thanks to our digital transformation. David Finney, director of IT Service Management, is excited about the rapid progress the CoE is making.

“The pace of AI technology is incredibly fast,” Finney says. “We’re moving into implementations quickly to capture value and stay relevant to developments in AI technology. Our digital transformation has made this possible in many ways.  At the same time, governance and control have to be at the forefront of our strategy and consider and respect responsible AI tenets in everything we do.”

Capturing strategy with an idea pipeline

The strategy pillar captures all the ideas and all the ongoing work that’s happening within AI at Microsoft. Idea capture involves the entire organization, and every employee is invited to contribute ideas for how AI can transform how we work, from the most straightforward task to the broadest organizational policies and processes. No element of our business processes is off-limits. Our pipeline contains ideas for the next year or so range from AI-powered career planning, to intelligent helpdesk and troubleshooting tools, to fully automated issue detection and remediation, to AI-powered codebase migration.

One of the CoE Strategy team’s most significant responsibilities is prioritizing the idea pipeline for AI solutions. All employees can feed the pipeline through a form that records important pipeline details. The strategy team evaluates each idea in the pipeline, analyzing two primary metrics: business value and implementation effort.

• Business value. How important is the solution to our business? Potential cost reduction, market opportunity, and user impact all factor into business value. As our business value increases, so does the idea’s position in the pipeline priority queue.
• Implementation effort. How much effort is required to implement the idea? We evaluate the implementation effort based on data gaps for modeling, the complexity of the solution, and the resources required. Low-effort ideas can result in quick wins, while ideas requiring more significant effort must be further evaluated.

Activating AI here at Microsoft

Business value and implementation effort supply the two axes for the simple four-quadrant matrix we use to determine the overall priority for the ideas and their order in the pipeline. High-value, low-effort ideas are at the start of the pipeline and our highest priority. Low-value, high-effort projects are sent to the back of the pipeline. High-value ideas are all essential and deserve focus, and our strategy team used this evaluation matrix to determine which projects should be started and when.

Architecture

Our architecture pillar focuses on the readiness and design of the infrastructure and services that support AI at Microsoft. It also encompasses data readiness and the reusability of enterprise assets used for AI capabilities.

The CoE’s Architecture team manages these systems’ supporting infrastructure and ensures that our environment adheres to best practices for standards and governance. Architecture dependencies and interactions are critical to establishing sound architecture practices.

When a product team is developing a service within the architecture, like storage, compute, or an API, decisions about design and architecture are influenced by the dependencies across these services.

The architecture we build is focused on open and liberal architecture standards. We know that if our engineers and developers use the tools they’re most comfortable and fluent with, they’ll be able to create quickly with competency and confidence. With more than hundreds of potential projects in the pipeline, rapid iteration and agility are critical.

We’ve made our teams aware of AI playgrounds and aggregators that they can use to explore supported AI tools and machine-learning models to test their scenarios and validate data-handling practices. Standardizing these playgrounds and aggregators provides freedom for our developers to experiment and innovate while staying within the bounds of our AI best practices and approved technologies.

We’re also enabling our architecture communities to collaborate and share ideas about developing the most optimal microservice architecture, cloud service-based architecture, or hybrid infrastructure architecture. We have presentations, on-demand engagements, and groups that use Microsoft Viva and Microsoft Teams to encourage and facilitate collaboration. This enables our architecture teams to move quickly and in concert with each other, which is necessary with the rapid pace of AI technology advancement.

A comprehensive architectural view involves understanding the nuances of the infrastructure and how new infrastructure will affect the current architectural state. We achieve this view by gathering data on systems and dependencies across the existing architecture and super-imposing new ideas or new architecture on top of it.

“We ask questions,” says Faisal Nasir, a principal architect on the CoE Architecture team. He stresses the importance of continual self-examination. “What are the touch points? What is the impact? How do we achieve cost and performance balance? Where are we going to invest? Which of these services is going to get the capabilities? How are we organizing services? What platform-level capability will all services use, and what will be native to a particular area or service within a smaller group?”

The answers help us make sure we take the right approach.

“Determining dependencies and working through the implications has to be done, and it has to be continually evaluated,” Nasir says.

Roadmap

The CoE Roadmap team examines our employee experience in the context of our AI solutions and governs how we achieve the optimal experience in and throughout AI projects. One of the most critical aspects of implementing AI is how our employees will interact with it. Getting the roadmap right ensures these user experiences are cohesive and align with our broader employee experience goals.

The Roadmap team leans heavily on research to confirm and test capabilities and the potential for AI-based services and processes. The user experience involves many considerations, including how employees interact with a service, ordinary use case scenarios, accessibility needs, etc.

We’ve recognized AI’s potential to impact how our employees get their work done and what level of satisfaction and positive experience comes from the interactions with AI services and tools. The roadmap pillar is designed to encourage experiences across all these services and tools that are complementary and cohesive.

“AI isn’t a traditional product, so there isn’t a traditional path for user experience,” says Aria Fredman, a senior user experience researcher on the CoE Roadmap team. “We’re using AI to level the playing field for all Microsoft employees.”

AI is an excellent tool for leveling the playing field for everyone.

“We’re using next-generation AI to transform how everyone interacts with the products we’re building,” Fredman says. “Natural language interfaces and predictive interactions remove the barriers of traditional input and user interface design. Accessibility becomes not something that we build into a user interface but something that the interface natively is. Our goal is universal accessibility, to use AI to empower and include everyone.”

We’re focusing on the open nature of AI interaction. We’re surfacing AI capabilities and information when the user needs them, according to their context. It makes the user experience and user interface for an AI service less important than how the service allows other applications or user interfaces to interact with it and harness its power.

“We’re moving away from the legacy models of interaction and navigation of static product topologies,” says Yannis Paniaras, a principal designer at the Microsoft Digital Studio who collaborates with other designers to create entirely new user experiences with AI and ML. “We’re transforming the user experience through AI and copilot-based experiences and creating new paradigms of interaction and navigation across a complex topology of services and products.”

Meet the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence team

It’s about design that simplifies employee workflows for speed and efficiency.

“Our goal is to enable instant point-to-point access to all employee services with minimal or no navigation,” Paniaras says. “It’s like experiencing UX-teleportation, where accessing a service becomes instantaneous.”

This concept is what we call “Just-In-Time UX.” Furthermore, we use AI to facilitate continuous relationships between our employees and the various services that they use, which ensures that the experiences are always on and available to them.

“In our studio, the designers are also reinventing how we design for the era of AI,” Paniaras says. “We are transforming our discipline as much as the experiences and products we create for everyone at Microsoft.”

Culture

Our long-running focus on fostering a culture of innovation within our organization is now helping us embrace this new opportunity with AI. It’s enabling us to empower our employees to learn the skills they need to lead us through this transformation and to help us build a vision for what we can do with it as a group.

Our CoE Culture team focuses on two key areas of our AI implementation: responsibility and education. Culture moves into and influences the other pillars more than any other pillar. Culture underpins everything we do in the AI space. Ensuring our employees can increase their AI skillsets and access guidance for using AI responsibly are critical to AI at Microsoft.

AI’s opportunities are immense, and our implementation must be carried out with a growth mindset and responsible approach.

The Culture team has published training, recommended practices, and our shared learnings on next-generation AI capabilities and worked with individual business groups at Microsoft to determine the needs of all the disciplines across the organization, including groups as diverse as engineering, facilities and real estate, human resources, legal, sales, and marketing, among many. A telling example of how we’re rallying around AI is how quickly we created a Data and AI curriculum that everyone in our larger organization can take—employees of all roles are using it learn about and roll AI into their individual work.

We’re weaving responsible AI into the fabric of everything we do with AI, so our employees understand the importance and implications of responsible AI for their work, their teams, and the organization. We’re continually asking questions about our AI practices and evaluating the answers through diverse lenses to ensure our AI capabilities are fair and unbiased.

Urvi Sengar is a leading voice on the cultural team. She highlights the critical role responsible AI plays in developing AI at Microsoft.

“AI provides so many potential capabilities, but we must always ask, ‘are we using it in the right way?’” says Sengar, a software engineer on the CoE and in Microsoft Digital. “We’re building governance and guardrails around our systems to ensure we don’t misuse it. Our mandate to use AI responsibly underpins everything we do in this space.”

Our aim is to weave AI and education together in ways that enhance but don’t overrun our company culture. Our aim is to show our employees how they can transform the work they do while also making sure they protect the social and cultural considerations of the rest of our employees, our partners, our customers, and our larger organization. To do this important work, we’re implementing listening systems throughout our organization that are enabling us to adjust and adapt our approach to make sure we stay focused on the right things.

Moving forward

We’re at the beginning of our journey toward harnessing the transformative power of AI at Microsoft. Our AI CoE will provide the guidance and governance we need to foster innovation and encourage positive disruption in all lines of business. We’re ushering in a new vision for creativity, productivity, and personal growth for each of our employees, and we’re excited to capture those benefits within our organization and share them with our customers.

“Whatever applications we produce, whatever experiences we create, whatever productivity and efficiency we want to bring to our employees, we always ask the question: ‘How will this contribute to their engagement and involvement and enable them to thrive within the company,’” Krishnamurthy says. “The answer to this question is found in the moments that matter to our employees, in which they meaningfully contribute to the teams around them and move forward toward our collective vision, from the beginning of their time with Microsoft and all the way through their journey.”

Here are some tips for getting started with a AI Center of Excellence at your company:

• Use AI to fuel organizational transformation and to improve your employee experience.
• Approach AI as a tool that can help your employees boost their creativity, enhance their productivity, and grow their skills.
• Provide personalized and contextualized information to increase employee satisfaction and productivity.
• Use AI to improve both the on-site and remote experiences for your employees—it can help you get hybrid work right.
• Use AI to improve your infrastructure management, compliance monitoring, governance, and real estate and space planning.
• Give your employees good guardrails—take a responsible and responsive approach in each area where you use AI.
• Encourage your employees to contribute ideas on how AI can improve their work processes and evaluate ideas that are most valuable and feasible.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability around AI and data, where failures become steppingstones, and cross-functional collaboration drives innovation.

Learn about the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access program and new capabilities in Copilot.

• Explore ChatGPT & AI: 6 Tips for Managing Support Content.
• Unpack a foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork.
• Discover transforming modern engineering at Microsoft.

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

The post The AI Revolution: How Microsoft Digital (IT) is responding with an AI Center of Excellence appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

IT journey at Microsoft

The rapid advance of AI is enabling us to rethink every dimension of IT. From the apps, workflows, and services that power our employee experience, to the network, infrastructure and devices that power our employee productivity, everything is evolving quickly.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers.”

In this article, we describe some of the ways we’re already using AI, as well as new investments we’re making to accelerate our own AI-powered transformation—and to inspire yours.

{Learn how we’re reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.Discover how we’re improving our Employee Experience as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.}

Resilient and secure infrastructure powered by AI

Reliable and secure access to corporate resources is paramount—especially at a company that has fully embraced flexible work. Our employees depend on a foundation of network connectivity to seamlessly access the tools and services they rely on every day. Harnessing the power of AI to ensure our employees stay productive and our network remains resilient and secure is one of our top investment areas in Microsoft Digital.

“AI offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink our enterprise infrastructure,” says Heather Pfluger, general manager of Infrastructure and Engineering Services in Microsoft Digital. “It’s an exciting time to be an IT leader at Microsoft as we consider all the ways IT can make our services more efficient, secure, and reliable.”

One way we’ll do that is by infusing data-driven intelligence into every part of our infrastructure, engineering, and operations to eliminate configuration drift, comply with standards and security policy, reduce operator effort and errors, and efficiently respond to rapidly changing business needs.

Investments in software defined networking and infrastructure-as-code are already improving reliability and network adaptability. AI is helping us automate workflows that deliver network services, detect anomalies, and manage compliance. We’re using real-time streaming telemetry from network devices to drive continuous operational improvements. We’ve used data from past incidents to train an AI model that will help our network engineers to reduce the time needed to mitigate infrastructure incidents with the goal of reducing or eliminating network outages and increasing employee productivity.

Securing the Microsoft network and other endpoints is critical to AI and Machine Learning (ML) are among our best tools to enhance the security and compliance of our cloud and on-premises network and hosting environments.

While Microsoft already benefits from a Zero Trust security posture, we’ll use AI and ML to further strengthen our network by automatically assigning devices to the right network, removing the burden on IT admins to classify and assign networks manually. We’ve implemented consistent access controls for wireless and wired networks to further improve security and reduce legacy VPN usage. We’re also building AI and ML capabilities to automate our security workflows, including analyzing device vulnerabilities, detecting anomalous firewall traffic flows, and managing incident diagnosis and remediation.

A vast network of interconnected devices running many different operating systems relies on our network for seamless connectivity. Managing these devices requires significant time and resources. To better manage them, we’re investing in a range of new AI-powered device capabilities spanning the entire device lifecycle.

AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting is a key investment area. We’ll use AI and ML to schedule essential maintenance tasks and autonomously fix errors and performance issues. This will reduce downtime, prolong device lifespans, and ensure employees have a consistent and productive experience by avoiding problems and errors. We’ll also use AI to analyze device settings, network activity, vulnerabilities, and user behavior, enhanced with demographic data and location metadata to offer relevant solutions for common and emerging device problems. We aim to help IT administrators be more productive through quicker decisions about device replacement, software updates, capacity increases, and other common support scenarios.

{Learn how we’re moving Microsoft’s global network to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Discover How AI will impact the future of security.}

Employee experiences enhanced with AI

AI enables possibilities to simplify the employee experience in unprecedented ways. Our vision in Microsoft Digital is to use AI to simplify the employee experience by providing a single endpoint for most common tasks. We envision a workplace where AI seamlessly integrates into our employees’ workflows and simplifies the number of systems they must learn and navigate. We’re working to deliver a unified, connected, and personalized experience where our employees can access critical data, tools, and insights, all from one place.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of Employee Productivity in Microsoft Digital. “AI enables us to deliver personalized experiences that empower our employees to work smarter, faster and happier.”

With Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot as a central engagement hub, we’ll redesign the employee experience to no longer be app centric, but rather employee centric, to meet people in the flow of their work.

Navigating with Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Our employees will discover information and services through natural language Q&A to complete tasks more smoothly. Business Chat will support a range of different employee experiences like diving into employee benefits, facilitating career planning, processing expenses, finding information, exploring workplace amenities, purchasing devices, or upskilling for a new role. We’ll connect different Copilot features and our internal data to Business Chat and reduce the time to get answers or insights by more than half. Our employees can still use web or app experiences if they prefer, but Business Chat will become a primary entry point for many workflows.

Generative AI will also change how our employees experience support services. We aim to increase employee productivity by addressing IT issues automatically or remotely through AI-powered chats that often don’t require an agent.

{Learn more about how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft. Discover how Microsoft Digital is reinventing employee productivity in the hybrid workplace.}

AI-powered transformation powered by good governance

We’re working to strike the right balance with AI—we want to use it to transform the way we work and to empower our employees while also protecting the company. To get this right, we’re laser focused on adopting the right governance measures.

“We’re going to be one of the first organizations to really get our hands on the whole breadth of AI capabilities,” says Matt Hempey, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “It will be our job to ensure we have good, sensible policies for eliminating unnecessary risks and compliance issues.”

Our team in Microsoft Digital manages some of the most complex Microsoft productivity tenants in the world, and the governance of those tenants can be a challenge. Unmanaged assets like Power BI workspaces, Power Apps, or even Microsoft Teams groups increase the risk of oversharing sensitive data and can compromise the health and security of the environment. AI will be instrumental in helping us manage our tenants more effectively by helping us to detect issues and by automating time-consuming compliance tasks.

High-quality enterprise data with strong data governance is another key to our AI-led transformation. We’re establishing processes and frameworks to ensure data quality, with assigned data owners to supervise them. We’re using tools to measure data quality and produce a quality score, enhancing confidence and trust among users so they can be confident using the data in AI scenarios.

However, high-quality data is useless without ongoing governance.We have years of experience managing Microsoft’s vital tenants, and we’ve experienced the complexities of governance at global enterprise scale. AI raises issues around privacy, reputation, and copyright. Responsible and ethical applications of AI, powered by effective data governance, are our priority, so that we as a company can keep innovating without risking security or reputational damage. Using tools like Microsoft Purview, we’ll pay attention to the source, sensitivity, and lifecycle of data for AI, focusing on discovery, classification, and protection. Our goal is to safely handle sensitive data, ensuring ethical uses to achieve the right business outcomes.

{Discover how Microsoft Digital is governing its key productivity tenants to support AI. Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.}

Transforming our approach to IT

In Microsoft Digital, we’re committed to innovating with AI to revolutionize our employee experience and to rethink IT management, work that we’ll power through consistent governance practices and high-quality enterprise data.

“From making our employees more productive to improving their experience in the hybrid workplace, to preemptively anticipating issues with our services, infrastructure, and devices, AI is fundamentally changing how we manage information technology at Microsoft,” D’Hers says.

As we’ve done since the early days of IT at Microsoft, we’ll push boundaries to become a catalyst for AI innovation for our employees and for our customers. Just as we helped shape the past three decades of enterprise IT innovation, the next steps we take on our IT journey here at Microsoft will help shape this new era of AI. We’re excited to continue sharing our insights from our journey of AI-powered transformation with our customers and partners.

Here are some learnings that we hope will help you in your journey to transform your approach to IT with AI:

• AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of IT administration and the employee experience. Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot can increase employee productivity by making information easier to find and by reducing or eliminating repetitive and mundane tasks, which will enable your employees to focus on higher value work.
• Enterprise data is your most valuable asset in the era of AI. Invest in data and tenant governance so you can use your data to support AI-powered productivity and collaboration workloads using Azure OpenAI and other services. Microsoft Purview offers a great solution to protect your sensitive enterprise data.
• We’ll be using the power of AI to rethink our entire IT portfolio here in Microsoft Digital. As Customer Zero for some of Microsoft’s most important products for IT professionals, our insights and product enhancements will improve the experience for our customers as well.

Get started with Azure AI.

• What is Azure OpenAI Service?
• Learn about Azure OpenAI Service.
• Get started with Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how we’re reinventing our employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re improving our employee experience as the company’s Customer Zero.
• Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.
• See how we’re getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.

• 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 Powering a generational shift in IT at Microsoft with AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Although these features have proven to be incredibly useful to our employees and our wider organization, there are also concerns about how retaining Microsoft Teams meeting data might affect our security posture, records retention policy, and privacy. Just like any other company, we at Microsoft have to balance these varying aspects.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re leading cross-disciplinary conversations to ensure we get it right.

{Learn how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365. Discover getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.}

Policy considerations of Microsoft Teams meeting data retention

Our Microsoft Teams meeting data comes in the form of three main artifacts: recordings, transcriptions, and data that AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot and recap services can use to increase our general business intelligence.

We find meeting recordings and transcripts are helpful for many reasons, including helping us overcome accessibility issues related to fast-paced, real-time meetings or language differences—this is a powerful way to level the playing field for our employees. Our ability to share recordings and transcripts also supports greater knowledge transfer and asynchronous work, which is especially helpful for teams that operate across time zones.

Microsoft Teams Premium enables AI-generated notes, task lists, personalized timeline markers for video recaps, and auto-generated chapters for recordings. Within a meeting, the Microsoft 365 Copilot sidebar experience helps our late-joining employees catch up on what they’ve missed, provides intelligent prompts to review unresolved questions, summarizes key themes, and creates notes or action items.

The helpfulness of these tools is clear, but data-retention obligations introduce challenges that organizations like ours need to consider. First, producing and retaining this kind of data can be complex if it isn’t properly governed. Second, data-rich artifacts like video recordings occupy a lot of space, eating up cloud storage budgets.

“We tend to think of the recordings we make during meetings as an individual’s data, but they actually represent the company’s data,” says Rachael Heade, director of records compliance for Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA). “We want to empower individuals, but we have to remember that retention and volume impacts of these artifacts on the company can be substantial.”

In light of these potential impacts, some organizations simply opt out of enabling Microsoft Teams meeting recordings.

Asking the right questions to assemble the proper guardrails

Our teams in Microsoft Digital and CELA, our legal division, are working to balance the benefits of Microsoft Teams meeting data retention with our compliance obligations to provide empowering experiences for our employees while keeping the company safe.

“Organizations are always concerned about centralized control over the retention and deletion of data artifacts,” Heade says. “You have excited employees who want to use this technology, so how do you set them up so they can use it confidently?”

Like many policy conversations, getting this right starts with our governance team in Microsoft Digital and our internal partners asking the employees from across the company who look after data governance the right questions:

• When should a meeting be recorded and when should it not?
• What kind of data gets stored?
• Who can initiate recording, and who can access it after the meeting?
• How long should we retain meeting data?
• Where does the data live while it’s retained?
• How can we control data capture and retention?
• What does this mean for eDiscovery management?

These questions help us think about the proper guardrails. Our IT perspective is only one part of the puzzle, so we’re actively consulting with CELA, corporate security, privacy, the Microsoft Teams product group, the company’s data custodians, and our business customers throughout this process.

“As an organization, this is about thinking through your tenant position and getting it to a reasonable state,” says David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect with Microsoft Digital.

Our conversations have brought up distinctions that any organization should consider as they build policy around Microsoft Teams meeting retention:

• The length of time a meeting’s data remains fresh, relevant, or useful
• The difference in retention value between operational and informational meetings, for example, weekly touchpoints versus project kick-offs or education sessions
• The different risks inherent in recordings compared to transcriptions
• Establishing default policies while allowing variability and flexibility when employees need it
• Long-term retention for functional artifacts like demos and trainings

From sharing perspectives to crafting policy

Our policies around Microsoft Teams meeting data retention continue to evolve, but we’ve already implemented some highly effective practices, policies, and controls. Every organization’s situation is unique, so it’s important that you speak to your legal professionals to craft your own policies. But our work should give you an idea of what’s possible through out-of-the-box features within Microsoft Teams.

The policies we’ve put in place represent a mix of technical defaults, meeting options, and empowering employees to make informed decisions about usefulness and privacy. They also build on the foundations of our work with sensitivity labeling, which is helping secure data across our tenant.

• Transcript attribution opt-out gives employees agency and reassures them that we honor their privacy.
• User notices alert employees when a recording or transcription starts, allowing them the opportunity to opt out, request that the meeting go unrecorded, or leave the call.
• Nuanced business guidance from CELA through an internal Recording Smart Use Statement document helps employees understand the implications of recording, when not to record, and when not to speak in a recorded call.
• Recommending that employees “tell and confirm” before recording empowers and supports our people to speak up when they don’t believe the meeting should be recorded or don’t feel comfortable.
• We didn’t wait for Compliance Recording: Although this choice would require that a user consent to recording before unmuting themselves, we decided that opt-outs and user notices provided sufficient agency to our employees.
• Meeting labels that limit who can record mean only the organizer or co-organizer can initiate recordings for meetings labeled “highly confidential.”
• Only meeting organizers can download meeting recordings tokeep the meeting data contained and restrict sharing.
• The default OneDrive and SharePoint meeting expiration is set to 90 days to ensure we minimize the risk of data leakage or cloud storage bloat.

These policies reflect three core tenets we use to inform our governance efforts: empower, trust, and verify.

“The bottom line is that we rely on our employees to be good stewards of the company,” Johnson says. “But because we’ve got a good governance model in place for Teams and good overall hygiene for our tenant, we’re well set up to deal with the evolution of the product and make these decisions.”

We can’t recommend that any organization follow our blueprint entirely, but asking some of the same questions as we have can help build a foundation. To start, read our blog post on how we create self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365 and explore this Microsoft Learn guide on meeting retention policies in Microsoft Teams.

With a firm grasp of the technology and close collaboration with the right stakeholders, you can guide your own policy decisions and unlock the right set of features for your team.

Here are some tips for approaching meeting data retention at your company:

• Face the fear and get comfortable with being uncomfortable: First, establish your concerns, then work toward optimizing your policy compliance.
• Consider how to support your company’s compliance obligations while allowing your employee population to take advantage of the product, and let those things live together side-by-side.
• Connecting with your legal team is essential because they’re the experts on assessing complex compliance questions.
• Investigate meeting labels and what policies you might want to apply to meetings based on sensitivity and other attributes.

See how Microsoft Teams Premium can help you manage your data retention.  

• Learn how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365.
• Discover getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.
• Unpack Microsoft Teams Premium—the smart place to work.
• Check out our Microsoft Teams Premium overview for administrators.
• Work with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• 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 Empowering employees after the call: Enabling and securing Microsoft Teams meeting data retention at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“Now it’s like creating a book where the pages are always changing,” says Yannis Paniaras, a principal designer in the Microsoft Digital Studio. “At the critical junction in the UX, where humans interact with Copilot, the AI transforms into the conductor of the user experience. This shift is enabling our designers to move away from defining fixed flows to embracing a non-deterministic design style orchestrated by the AI.”

Microsoft Digital Studio is our team of designers and researchers in Microsoft Digital. The Microsoft Digital Studio team is committed to using their expertise in design, research, content strategy, accessibility, and product planning to create experiences that empower Microsoft employees to achieve more in their lives.

Paniaras has observed that designing an AI-enabled product is very different from designing a traditional desktop or mobile app. In conversations with designers, program managers, and developers, he frequently encounters questions about how various product-making disciplines should coordinate their work in this new context.

“We have Copilot, powered by a large language model (LLM), and we use Fluent AI design language for experiences that rely on lean graphical user interfaces with dynamic prompts and dynamically generated, contextual cards,” Paniaras says. “These provide just-in-time user interface elements that map to the generative flow. Consequently, designers are shifting their focus from standard UI towards the vocabulary of prompts, dynamically designed adaptive cards, and on finding consistency withing the UX context. These elements are becoming the new building blocks of AI-based UX design.”

The Microsoft Digital Studio team’s designers still work in Figma, the popular design and prototyping tool, but their designs need to remain open-ended and sometimes more abstract, rather than a set of fixed linear designs.

“The design becomes a set of probabilities,” Paniaras says. “While this poses a challenge for designers, it also encourages us to collaborate more closely with everyone else.”

Laura Bergstrom, a principal UX manager for the Unified Employee Experience team, adds that content designers and designers on her team developed guidance for engineers to scale Copilot responses creating consistent, reliable responses with the right tone of voice at the right time.

“With all the power of generative AI, user experience and design are still responsible for the quality of the experience and the outcome, so we’re finding ways to scale working with engineering and data science,” Bergstrom says.

Spurring collaboration with AI

Using AI to quickly align plans and goals is causing a shift in the way the entire product-making crew works together. “All the different disciplines are working together to get things in place,” Paniaras says.

He tells a story of a designer who worked concurrently with PMs and engineers to design prompts, comparing it with the previous way of doing things.

“It used to be different: you had research, based on that you would have ideas, prototype certain things, build them, then engineers would test them,” Paniaras says. “It was more linear.”

Modern engineering with AI requires a shift to a more collaborative culture on product teams, where there aren’t clear lines of ownership and people can work flexibly together. It’s similar to the shift that engineering went through from the waterfall approach to agile, when instead of owning specific pieces, engineers swarmed over one part of the product for a sprint, then swarmed on another part in the next sprint.

Transitional UI interfaces

Victor Albahadly, a senior UX designer on the Microsoft Digital Studio team, says AI has potential to transform the way he does his core job, which is to test to find out where the designs he and his team build breakdown and fail to meet the needs of the people who will use them.

“I need to figure out what the user wants,” Albahadly says. “When we build an application, I need to know where they are coming from, what they want to do, and where the experience that we’re building for them will break down.”

The challenge is that he has to sample the experiences users have with his designs and extrapolate what he learns to the rest of the design. And importantly, he does this at scale—not for just one person, but for all the people who use the application.

“I need to test how the experience will work for many people,” he says. “That’s an intense process.”

AI has the potential to change that because it will be able to see everything—something a human will never be able to do on their own.

“With AI’s help, someday in the near future, I’ll be able to test the entire application,” Albahadly says. “There will be a lot of power in that.”

AI can help designers get this kind of scale at every step in the process, which not only makes the results far more accurate, but also much faster.

Transforming user testing with AI

The future of ideation

Albahadly also envisions AI enhancing parts of the design process. Today, ideation is done by talking to experts and customers, holding brainstorming sessions, and doing workshops. In the future, he suggests he could do similar ideation with his teammates and AI.

“In your app, say there’s a huge drop-off of traffic coming from Japan,” he says. “Now we need to do a workshop to find out why this is happening. The AI could point to specific stuff like a language barrier or culture barrier, or a time issue like a holiday. Instead of taking a week to ideate, it could become a step in the process the same day.”

In addition to changes in design processes, generative AI is changing the user experience.

“We’ve had a linear way of pumping out experiences—an OS, products on top of it, and apps,” Bergstrom says. “Now there are different copilots, different extensibility, ways of doing things on surfaces. This all has to make sense to a user end-to-end.”

It requires a lot of design thinking to produce that experience.

Data quality is also crucial to producing an experience that makes sense. “Generative AI is a wildcard, which requires data to be more pristine,” Bergstrom says.

For example, the LLM for Microsoft 365 can go through all your emails and SharePoint sites. If you type in “benefits,” it should identify the authoritative source and display that information—not go through your email to find every benefits-related message you’ve ever gotten.

Transforming work with AI

What about the potential of AI to do routine, repetitive work and give people the time to do higher value work? Bergstrom sees a wide range of opportunities.

“We can use generative AI to help employees with everyday tasks, from finding the best place to park to managing the immigration process to identifying the best selections for employee benefits,” Bergstrom says. “And for large enterprises, we can use generative AI to help manage facilities by identifying cost-to-benefit ratios, building usage, and for finding the best locations to have offices.”

Both Bergstrom and Albahadly see an opportunity for AI to help employees write their performance reviews. Bergstrom notes that it could help managers combine review feedback from multiple sources and tie it to OKRs.

And Albahadly says that for employees, AI can help with writing their own performance reviews.

“That’s been a challenge for most Microsoft employees, because at the end of the year, you have to sit and remember everything you worked on,” he says.

Because AI will be exposed to your meetings, your calendar, your projects, it will be easy for it to co-write your review with you.

“In the future, it will be less writing and more selecting stuff, and AI will generate a whole year for you,” Albahadly says.

With all this transformation happening, some people worry about the future of work.

Paniaras is optimistic.

“Everything around us, including our roles, work, processes, and definitions of values, has been created by us humans” he says. “Whenever any of these dimensions change, we inevitably end up redefining them or filling the void. But you need to have that thinking attitude, and the recognition that everything around us is a result of our own making.”

Bergstrom agrees.

“Durable problems don’t change,” she says. “But now we have infinitesimally more ways to solve for those problems with an intelligent assistant that can anticipate needs and predicts possibilities—we’re just trying to figure out how to harness all the capability in our designs.”

Try out Microsoft 365 Copilot to learn what you can do with AI.

Watch John Maeda’s LinkedIn Learning class—UX for AI: Design Practices for AI Developers—to learn more about how collaboration works with AI.

Here are some tips for getting started with generative AI at your company:

1. Embrace AI as a collaborator:
   • Consider AI as a creative partner. It can augment your design process by suggesting patterns, layouts, and interactions.
   • Collaborate with AI tools to generate design variations, explore possibilities, and iterate faster.
2. Understand AI’s capabilities and limitations:
   • Familiarize yourself with the types of AI algorithms commonly used in design, such as neural networks, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and reinforcement learning.
   • Recognize that AI has limitations—it can’t replace human intuition, empathy, or domain expertise. Use it as a tool to enhance your creativity.
3. Design for adaptability and personalization:
   • AI-driven UX should be adaptable and personalized. Create interfaces that adjust dynamically based on user behavior, context, and preferences.
   • Use AI to tailor experiences for individual users, providing relevant content and recommendations.
4. Collect and curate data:
   • AI models require data to learn and improve. Collect relevant user data (with privacy considerations) to train AI algorithms.
   • Curate high-quality datasets that represent diverse user scenarios and behaviors.
5. Iterate and refine AI models:
   • Start with simple AI models and gradually increase complexity. Iterate based on user feedback and real-world usage.
   • Regularly evaluate and fine-tune AI models to ensure they align with user needs and business goals.
6. Ethical considerations:
   • Be mindful of biases in AI algorithms. Ensure fairness, transparency, and inclusivity.
   • Understand the ethical implications of AI-driven decisions and design accordingly.
7. Learn from existing AI-driven products:
   • Study successful AI-powered products and services. Analyze how they integrate AI seamlessly into the user experience.
   • Learn from industry leaders and adapt their best practices to your own projects.

Remember, AI is a powerful tool, but it’s most effective when combined with human creativity and empathy. By embracing AI and understanding its role, UX designers can create innovative, personalized, and adaptive experiences for users.

Find out what you can do with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• Take this UX for AI: Design Practices for AI Developers class with Microsoft’s John Maeda.
• Explore these five communications-based tips for prompting Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Unpack deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Discover embracing emerging technology at Microsoft with new AI certifications.

• 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 Redesigning how we work at Microsoft with generative AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“In 2024, meeting rooms are reinterviewing for their jobs,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital, our IT organization here at Microsoft.

And just like any job candidate, a meeting room must now demonstrate its adaptability, technological proficiency, and ability to foster collaboration in a hybrid environment, says Marzynski, who’s part of the team at The Hive, our meeting room incubation lab, where we invent the way modern meeting and collaboration feels.

Our journey of reinterviewing our Microsoft Teams-based meeting rooms is more than just a metaphor—it’s a crucial step toward creating workspaces that flex, adjust, and adapt to meet the demands of today’s world.

As is the case with most large companies, our shift to remote work happened suddenly with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic, of course, upended the way the work world operates, thinks, and interacts. Its impact on our company culture, infrastructure, and processes has been long-lasting.

Before the pandemic, meeting rooms were primarily used for in-person gatherings, with virtual participation as an afterthought. Now that we’re deep into the era of hybrid work, powered by our Microsoft Teams Rooms platform, we understand that remote participants are equally important and should be treated as such. When we work in a culture that emphasizes freedom of location, technology shouldn’t limit that choice.

Small shifts weren’t enough

At Microsoft, we’ve already made improvements to smaller rooms and executive boardrooms, adding high-quality speakers and intelligent cameras that pan, tilt, and zoom automatically. We’ve also transformed our meeting spaces digitally and evolved the physical layout of our meeting rooms to better accommodate hybrid meetings and to promote collaboration. This includes more welcoming seating layouts, interactive displays, and top-tier acoustics, ensuring all participants, in-person or remote, have a good experience.

If you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front. The presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

Our biggest challenge yet has been creating a top-notch remote experience for our very large spaces. Picture the kind of venues that host all-staff meetings, events, and large-scale training sessions. Historically, such gatherings—those with dozens or even a hundred people in the room and the same number online—haven’t given remote attendees a good experience, primarily because they weren’t designed with remote employees in mind. They tend to show only the presenter and leave out important context.

“If you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front,” says Sam Albert, product manager for the Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences team at Microsoft Digital. “The presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.”

It’s difficult for presenters as well.

“Getting the feel of the entire digital and physical audience, getting the combined energy of the venue, that doesn’t really happen well in these spaces,” Marzynski says.

Compounding the challenge, the people in the room don’t have a sense of what’s going on online, and online participants aren’t able to interact with either the people in the room or their fellow remote participants.

Identifying problems like these is one thing; devising solutions is quite another. That’s what The Hive is for—it’s a laboratory for dreaming up new ideas and bringing them to fruition.

Addressing the complexities of large hybrid gatherings

When the team at The Hive took on the large spaces challenge, they quickly realized that layering on minor fixes wouldn’t do. A venue is not simply a scaled-up conference room because the dynamics of participation are different. Big, bold solutions were needed that required reexamining, reimagining, and redesigning both how Microsoft adapts existing tech and builds it fresh.

They’re an important 400 to get right because of the number of impressions an event generates plus the stakes involved. When something goes wrong, you can’t just move to another space.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Unique challenges

Since 2020, Microsoft has been refreshing and retrofitting its 13,000-plus meeting rooms worldwide, equipping them with advanced new cameras, improved audio, and front-of-room screens. Of these, only around 400 are venues, or as we call them at Microsoft, multipurpose rooms. But, as Marzynski puts it, “They’re an important 400 to get right because of the number of impressions an event generates plus the stakes involved. When something goes wrong, you can’t just move to another space.”

As The Hive team invented solutions for such rooms, they identified several unique challenges, including scale, cost, inclusion, and the technology itself.

Technological complexities

Our team at The Hive has had many direct engagements with our customers. And just like Microsoft, they’re evaluating their real-estate footprints and squeezing more value out of their square footage. They are also ”re-interviewing” some of these expensive and dedicated venues to ensure a fit for purpose. This common opportunity led to one of our team’s first technical hurdles: figuring out how to build video and audio for spaces that weren’t designed for hybrid meetings and weren’t built with AV capability from the ground up. Success would mean bringing better group experiences, at a lower cost, to more employees.

“Even before COVID, it was a challenge to build any kind of AV hybrid experience because these big rooms are just very complicated,” Albert says. “They require a lot of planning and expensive equipment.”

Marzynski cites the inherent flexibility needed for large spaces.

“You might set it up differently depending on the event,” he says. “You might have worktables. You might have desks like in a classroom, or you might have a banquet style with clusters of tables.”

Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we said, ‘All right, what if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?’ Then we took that and said, ‘All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?’

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our team hypothesized that there were three things they had to address: the entire audience’s relation to content, the remote and physical audience’s relationship with each other, and the presenter’s relationship with both groups

“Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we asked, ‘What if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?’” Marzynski says. “Then we took that and said, ‘All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?’”

Marzynski says that from there, the team built a prototype without a room in mind, “out in open air. We tested it. We prototyped it. We broke it to make sure that it was working. And then we asked ourselves, ‘Can we build a room around this? And does it have to be a specific room, or can it be kind of a range of spaces? Can it be flexible? Can it adapt? And importantly, ‘How much will it cost?’”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS3efXIKjpA, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Balancing cost and scale

Imagine a venue: a spacious training room, or a group of modular rooms that can be doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled in size. Because they’re large and designed for a high degree of flexibility, equipping such enormous spaces properly is expensive, mostly because of the custom technology required. They’re among the most expensive square footage that an office building can have, they cost a lot to operate, and they generate the highest percentage of service tickets in our AV estate.

The Hive’s success with hybrid-enabling and value-engineering smaller meeting rooms, and the positive feedback they received, buoyed their enthusiasm for their attempt to solve large spaces.

Everything we do, scale is at the forefront of our strategy. It’s one thing to come up with a really creative and awesome experience within The Hive. But if it can’t live outside of The Hive with one of our specialty experts operating it, then it’s dead on arrival.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

The smaller conference rooms were one thing, but costs are higher for large venues with the extra technology needed to support them.

“Everything we do, scale is at the forefront of our strategy,” Albert says. “It’s one thing to come up with a really creative and awesome experience within The Hive. But if it can’t live outside of The Hive with one of our specialty experts operating it, then it’s dead on arrival.”

Customer Zero: Iterating through feedback

To redesign venues, The Hive team used its lab to stress-test AI-driven presenter cameras, dedicated displays for remote attendees, a dedicated camera to capture the live audience, and enhanced Microsoft Teams features, among other tech.

After they had a working prototype, they were able to try it out internally with real events and get feedback via our Customer Zero program, in which we test and improve our own tech to help make our products better and more engaging. This allows us to offer our customers the best product we can.

“We brought our very rough early prototype into one of our all-hands meetings. It went reasonably well, Marzynski says. “It was a friendly audience, and we got some fantastic feedback.”

They put that feedback into action and prepared to show off new features at the following all-hands. It wasn’t quite smooth sailing.

“We did a dozen or so test events and many of them went well, but a couple were awful. We attempted to integrate some new technology into the older, existing AV and it just failed. Mic feedback, people couldn’t hear each other, that kind of stuff. Everyone was frustrated.”

But that’s all part of the innovation process.

“The feedback we received was blunt but actually encouraging. Our test users saw the potential and were cheering us on,” Marzynski says, “it was ‘Let’s keep making this better.’ So we kept testing it over and over again and it actually helped us make some important design choices.”

At every stage, the team sat down with their Microsoft Digital colleagues to refine their approach.

“We had workshops with our design teams,” Albert says. “We met with our research teams. We interviewed instructors and presenters who do Azure trainings every day. We talked to participants. That gave us a chance to really understand and dig deep into a lot of the challenges that are faced by people who are using these spaces.”

Designing for an equitable experience

The feedback from their Microsoft Digital colleagues underscored one unequivocal principle: Anything The Hive team developed had to be inclusive, equitable, and accessible to both in-person and remote employees.

Why?

Doing so creates an even playing field. It builds company culture. It’s empowering. It’s collaborative. It’s also good for business: When remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage to their in-person peers, everyone feels more invested in the discussion and outcomes.

They’re part of the discussion and they’re not ignored. The larger the space, the harder it is to make everyone feel included. We added multiple cameras so remote employees can see the dynamic of the room.

— Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Hybrid Meetings and Workplace Productivity team, Microsoft Digital

Meetings that are natural and engaging help everyone feel like they’re in the same room.

“They’re part of the discussion and they’re not ignored,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for hybrid meetings and workplace productivity at Microsoft Digital. “The larger the space, the harder it is to make everyone feel included. We added multiple cameras so remote employees can see the dynamic of the room.”

It’s about making remote attendees feel fully included. “They can be avatars,” Sherry says. “They can be themselves. Whatever makes them comfortable.”

The important thing is that their cameras show them on the participant display.

“That reminds people in the room that many of the attendees are remote,” Sherry says. “It improves the experience for both, and remote employees are less likely to be forgotten.”

That said, there’s no doubt that the experiences will never be exactly the same for those in the room and those calling in remotely.

“There’s a certain energy that we’re not able to—or even trying to—replicate for remote participants,” Albert says. “We’re not trying to make it equal, really. We’re trying to make it the best it can be for each group.”

Taking advantage of internal and external insights

As Customer Zero, Microsoft provides The Hive with a fertile environment for a virtuous circle of improvements and feedback. The team has been working closely with different product groups to drive new features and priorities, which they pour back into subsequent improvements.

For example, The Hive team has partnered with our Continuous Learning team that, owing to its numerous trainings, are heavy users of larger venues.

And externally, they’ve involved a few trusted customers to help them get even more actionable feedback, adding to the iterative cycle.

“We have conversations with customers and event planners to try to make sure we’re not leaving any big holes in our experience and capabilities,” Albert says. “We’re now trying to cover all these different scenarios that we might not have been expecting when we were originally designing the space.”

The team anticipates getting a manufacturing partner involved and piloting a handful of solutions with different partners in the US, India, and Asia. The key going forward is making the tech for these large spaces modular by design, so they’re easier and quicker to install—and easier to support.

We’re not ripping out walls. We’re not asking people to stand on tall ladders to change projectors and ceiling mics. We’re not running cables to server rooms. We’re using very simplistic AV designs that still provide all the experiences of enabling a team’s hybrid event.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

Lessening the complexity is a key concern. Initially, installing the large venue solution that they built took 30 days and a lot of technical work. But working closely with the installers to streamline the process has cut that down to 2 days.

“We’re not ripping out walls. We’re not asking people to stand on tall ladders to change projectors and ceiling mics. We’re not running cables to server rooms,” Albert says. “We’re using very simplistic AV designs that still provide all the experiences of enabling a team’s hybrid event.”

We’re saving money because we need fewer AV devices and because our install time is significantly reduced. A room that took four days to deploy can now be deployed in less than a day.

— Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Hybrid Meetings and Workplace Productivity team, Microsoft Digital

Our new large venue solution has had another major benefit—it has substantially reduced our operating costs. “In our pilot, we’re seeing our cost of deploying these large rooms go down by more than 50 percent,” Sherry says.

The reason is the new solution is so much simpler than the old one.

“We’re saving money because we need fewer AV devices and because our install time is significantly reduced,” Sherry says. “A room that took 30 days to deploy can now be deployed in 2days.”

In addition, we anticipate that our total cost of ownership will go down over time because our room designs are easier to support and manage.

Building on success

As The Hive team continues to gather feedback and address the many complex aspects of creating hybrid capabilities in venues, they’re focused on solutions that please every participant, whether in person or remote, and keeping the barriers for entry, such as cost, as low as possible.

Their work has netted what they call “drop-in” solutions, which are less complex technology lifts that can be quickly deployed in existing spaces without a lot of infrastructure investment. Such spaces receive an upgraded technology kit that includes projectors and audience-framing cameras, among other goodies.

Albert reports that customers who have visited the demo at The Hive have shown great interest in piloting venue solutions in their own spaces. Working with the tech that The Hive team has created lowers the barriers that customers face in testing and discovering new solutions on their own and burnishes Microsoft Digital’s reputation as an IT innovation center.

Our work to reinvent our large multipurpose venues has just begun and will continue—so far these ultra important rooms are absolutely acing reinterviewing for their jobs.

Here are some tips on how you can improve your large meeting experience at your company:

• To meet your business needs in a hybrid world, rethink your employee experience across all digital capabilities and physical spaces.
• Historically, venue spaces haven’t given remote attendees an equal experience compared to those in the room physically, but doing so benefits all parties and is good for business: Hybrid multipurpose venues boost inclusivity, productivity, and accessibility for both in-person and remote attendees.
• Venues aren’t just scaled-up meeting rooms. The dynamics of large, hybrid events demand a different AV engineering approach.
• You positively impact your company culture when remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage compared to their in-person peers because everyone feels more invested in the discussion and the meeting’s outcomes.
• Companies spend a lot of money on real estate, but the priority needs to be on creating value without having to structurally redesign; that’s how you get maximum impact with minimum effort.

Learn more about The Hive team and its approach to creating hybrid experiences.

• Learn how we’re designing a new hybrid meeting experience for everyone.
• See how we enable our employees to work remotely with Microsoft Teams.
• Unpack why businesses need to rethink their workspace experiences now.

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 Getting hybrid right: How we’re transforming large meetings at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Leading our accessibility efforts over the past two years, I’ve seen teams make great progress—not just in those experiences, but also in the culture we’ve created across the organization. It’s energizing when you hear someone share an accessibility tip in a meeting or see the “Accessibility: Good to Go” message in someone’s PowerPoint presentation.

We have continued to evolve the way we incorporate accessibility practices into our employee experiences—from meeting etiquette to the digital experiences that enable our employees to do their best work. And with the recent explosion of generative AI using machine learning to further drive productivity improvements, it’s important we continue to extend these practices to new experiences, so everyone benefits.

We worked with the Accessibility team to create a quick guide of best practices for large, internal meetings like Town Halls that serves as a checklist for administrators, meeting organizers and leaders. It helps us all be consistent on what to do when planning a meeting to help everyone fully participate.

—Michelle Strub, executive communications lead, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Following are three practices our teams have learned and do regularly that can be applied across your own organization. Adopting and championing these can increase productivity and higher engagement.

[Learn how to create inclusive content with the new Accessibility Assistant in Microsoft 365. Take our accessibility fundamentals training. Learn about our responsible AI program. Find out about our pursuit of inclusive AI.]

Practice #1: Regularly communicate and model key behaviors for inclusive meetings

Meetings are critical to getting work done, whether it’s communicating priorities, driving alignment, brainstorming ideas, or making decisions. Features in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 help people customize their experience, but we found many people weren’t aware of the options available. And while our accessible events guide gives lots of useful information, we found it was sometimes hard for people to know what to adopt and when.

“We worked with the Accessibility team to create a quick guide of best practices for large, internal meetings like Town Halls that serves as a checklist for administrators, meeting organizers and leaders,” says Michelle Strub, an executive communications lead in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “It helps us all be consistent on what to do when planning a meeting to help everyone fully participate.”

It really brought to light the customer pain point by having the employee walk through and share their experience with the tool. I tried to put myself in their shoes by closing my eyes and trying to follow along. That’s when I realized how confusing it was.

—Jaimie Larsen, product manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Companies can develop their own checklists to increase awareness of important practices, building up adoption over time. While some of these features were initially designed to support individuals with disabilities, we found the following practical tips encouraged everyone to participate and engage effectively.

• Encourage presenters to watch our inclusive presentation skills.
• Share materials in advance and use the accessibility checker in Microsoft Office.
• Use PowerPoint Live to enable features like real-time captions and translation.
• Record meetings so people can catch up later or review to improve understanding.

Practice #2: Build empathy and understanding through storytelling

Creating connections is central to the human experience. We’ve seen employees across Microsoft share their stories, and the stories of others, to improve understanding about why it’s important to create experiences that consider the needs of everyone. Jaimie Larsen, a product manager in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, was new to accessibility when she met with engineers across her organization to understand their needs and challenges. She quickly realized that the engineers didn’t always understand the impact a poorly designed tool could have on someone’s daily work. She found inspiration to start a quarterly series that featured employees and how they use different tools.

“It really brought to light the customer pain point by having the employee walk through and share their experience with the tool. I tried to put myself in their shoes by closing my eyes and trying to follow along. That’s when I realized how confusing it was,” Larsen says.

Due to this session, Larsen created a stronger understanding of the importance of the work to the engineering team for the specific tool and others were able to learn from it.

It’s been a multi-year journey as we have shared our expertise at Microsoft and worked with ServiceNow to develop practices and processes that continually improve the experiences for our employees.

—Sherif Mazhar, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

“It was great because we needed multiple teams to do work to make the experience better,” Larsen says. “This session really helped anchor the goal and impact for everyone.”

Practice #3: Create alignment on accessibility with partners internally and externally

We partner with teams across Microsoft and external organizations to deliver employee experiences globally. Using international accessibility standards including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), teams have developed strong partnerships and commitment to ensure that accessibility is included as a key requirement and measure of success. One of these partnerships has been with ServiceNow, where Sherif Mazhar, a principal program manager, worked closely with ServiceNow to align accessibility goals and drive improvements together.

“It’s been a multi-year journey as we have shared our expertise at Microsoft and worked with ServiceNow to develop practices and processes that continually improve the experiences for our employees,” Mazhar says.

Leaders at Microsoft and ServiceNow have aligned on accessibility goals and now review progress quarterly against common goals.

It takes time to build up relationships and expertise when the primary job someone is used to doing is not focused on technology. I’ve found it helpful to explain the impact and show what happens, rather than just talking about an issue. It can be easy for people to get lost if you use too much technical jargon.

—Erika Retikis, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team works with our colleagues in Microsoft Human Resources to build internal and external partnerships that are increasing accessibility awareness and knowledge. Erika Retikis, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, has worked with multiple customer companies over the last few years and sees many unique challenges, especially for those companies or teams that aren’t as tech savvy.

“It takes time to build up relationships and expertise when the primary job someone is used to doing is not focused on technology. I’ve found it helpful to explain the impact and show what happens, rather than just talking about an issue. It can be easy for people to get lost if you use too much technical jargon,” Retikis says.

Looking ahead: Artificial Intelligence needs accessibility from the start

As we and other companies look at how artificial intelligence is embedded into different experiences, it will be critical to think about accessibility from the start to ensure that the data and the experiences include everyone. One area of focus is ensuring data sets include a variety of people and situations. We also regularly include employees with disabilities at various product development stages to benefit from their perspective and create more accessible and inclusive experiences.

So, when you are thinking about building and adopting inclusive experiences, you should try and keep the above tips in mind, as well as other best practices included in some of the resources below, to ensure that your employee experiences are created with everyone at the center.

• Learn more about creating an accessibility training program for your team.
• Dive into the latest accessibility fundamentals training course on Microsoft Learn. 
• Learn how to create inclusive content with the new Accessibility Assistant in Microsoft 365.
• Take our accessibility fundamentals training.
• Learn about our responsible AI program.
• Find out about our pursuit of inclusive AI.

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 Disability as a strength: Three practices to help you create inclusive experiences at your company appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Mesh addresses those questions head-on, enabling shared experiences from anywhere through mixed reality applications. This truly has the potential to revolutionize the hybrid workplace—and the first step in that revolution? Avatars.

An avatar is a digital representation of yourself. You may have used avatars before for things like gaming profiles or social media, but in a business setting? That’s brand new for all of us.

As members of the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience organization, we’re responsible for the technology experiences of customer zero: people working at Microsoft. We knew people would have many questions about avatars. How do they affect connections between coworkers? How do they impact meeting effectiveness and outcomes? Can an avatar ever truly be seen as “professional”?

Everything we do at Microsoft is backed by data, feedback, and research. To tackle these questions, that’s where we had to start.

[Read our blog post about how Avatars for Microsoft Teams is rolling out to general availability in phases starting this week. Learn how you can get more out of your meetings with our Microsoft Teams Meeting guide. Explore how we’re making Microsoft Teams Premium better for customers. Discover how we’re transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.]

Doing the research

It’s important that the work we do supports the creation of a “responsible metaverse,” an inclusive space that’s designed with people’s wellbeing in mind. With that in mind, we engaged with stakeholders and partners to support research and development on diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. We worked with Microsoft researchers, Microsoft Mesh developers and product engineers, and partners both inside and outside of Microsoft. Together, we spent months gathering survey data and user feedback.

These surveys covered a lot of ground, including:

• Inclusive options for creating an avatar
• Overall experience with avatar movement
• Avatars’ responses to audio cues
• Variety in customization and representation

After poring through literally thousands of pieces of feedback, one fact became crystal clear: personalization is king. People want to be able to represent themselves in accordance with their preferences, in detail.

We also found a lot of diversity in how people respond to avatars. Some people find that avatars offer a new level of inclusivity and comfort; others found them distracting or odd. Both reactions are valid, and we wanted to make sure people had guidance for navigating these new experiences.

Taking business etiquette to virtual spaces

As we sifted through all this research, we realized that—after the initial question of, “How do I customize my avatar?”—the second question on people’s minds was, “How should I use avatars?” This summarizes infinite questions about appropriateness. Are avatars useful in all meetings? When is it okay make an avatar dance, and when is it not? This is a whole new world of business etiquette, something no one had experienced before.

In the past, business etiquette and company culture has been learned in person, often picked up by watching others interact and interpreting subtle queues like body language. Clearly, we couldn’t do that here. We needed avatar etiquette. So, armed with our research and key findings, we created guidance for Microsoft employees that we can use as we entered this new world together.

Avatar etiquette

There are no hard and fast rules about when to use an avatar. Like so many things at work, whether an avatar is appropriate or not depends on context.

Understand how avatars currently work

Today’s avatar movement is based solely on audio and any avatar reaction you may choose. Your avatar’s mouth movement is driven by the sound of your voice, and it can’t mimic your body’s movements.

However, it does move a bit on its own. This could come across as insensitive or inappropriate, depending on the context.

As avatar technology evolves, our best practices and etiquette will evolve too. For now, here are the questions we ask ourselves when deciding whether to use an avatar or not.

What kind of meeting is it? What’s its intent?

Strategic, tactical, social—the meeting type influences if an avatar is appropriate. Think about the intent and hoped-for outcomes.

In general, if you would otherwise have your camera off, it’s great to use an avatar instead. Here are some examples:

• A weekly sync with your immediate team
• A hybrid social event for your organization
• An ideation session
• A lunch-and-learn session where you may be eating

There are some meetings where we recommend not using an avatar:

• A one-on-one meeting—unless, of course, you’ve discussed it and would both like to use them.
• Performance reviews (but you probably knew that, right?).
• If you’re involved in a sensitive conversation where body language and facial expression help with engagement. Using your video is best for that.

Will you be presenting?

Whether or not an avatar is appropriate while presenting depends on your audience and presentation content. Who are you presenting to? What is your content and desired outcome?

For some presentations, you probably won’t want to use an avatar (like a proposal to leadership). But for others (like a learning session), it may actually add to your presentation! Consider your audience, content, and desired outcome. This will help you decide. Avatars can be a great ice breaker!

When in doubt, ask!

Avatars are new for all of us, so it’s important to bring a growth mindset when using them.

• Have a conversation with your coworkers about how your team feels about avatars. Are there specific guidelines you want to set for your team?
• Are there times avatars might feel like a distraction?
• If you’re a presenter in someone else’s meeting, ask them if they have a preference for how you show up.
• What makes you feel the most comfortable? Your preferences matter, too!
• Remember: it can take a while for people to grow comfortable with new technology, especially when it feels personal. If we all treat each other with mutual respect—including our “avatar selves”—we’ll go a long way toward making every meeting inclusive and effective.

When is it okay to bust a move?

Fist bumps, the wave, peace out—there are a lot of super fun avatar reactions to play with. They add a lot of energy and enthusiasm to a meeting, but sometimes, it’s best to stay still.

Think about it this way: if you were in a physical room with the other meeting attendees, would you do that same physical reaction? If the answer is no, then wait until the moment’s right.

And please do remember, an avatar’s movement does not currently mirror the movement of the person behind the avatar. So, if you need to step away during a meeting, remember to tell people. They can’t tell from your avatar!

Representation matters

One key thing to keep in mind: an avatar represents the way that person wants to be represented. This may sometimes mean your avatar doesn’t look the way others expect. That’s okay! The goal is for you to feel accurately represented and fully included. You’re the only one who decides what that means to you.

That said, sometimes we do want an outside opinion. If you feel like you’re having a tough time getting your avatar right, ask a trusted teammate for feedback. It can be fun to hop on a call and do it together.

Please do be aware of and avoid cultural appropriation and remember our commitment to being diverse and inclusive. If you’re not finding the right options for customizing your avatar, let us know by providing feedback through the Teams desktop app. The avatar team is eagerly working to make improvements that allow everyone to be expressive, engaged, represented, and heard.

It’s going to take all of us to create a responsible metaverse. Like all forms of etiquette, our guidance will evolve over time to make sure it meets the needs of a diverse global workforce. We’ll continue to iterate and present new features, customization options, and overall experiences with avatars that support a new and connected way to show up in our world of flexible work.

Read our blog post about how Avatars for Microsoft Teams is rolling out to general availability in phases starting this week, and the latest Mesh product and customer news. Learn how to set up avatars for your organization, and how to join a meeting with a avatar. For more information, visit our Microsoft Mesh website.

• Read our blog post about how Avatars for Microsoft Teams is rolling out to general availability in phases starting this week.
• Learn how you can get more out of your meetings with our Microsoft Teams Meeting guide.
• Explore how we’re making Microsoft Teams Premium better for customers.
• Discover how we’re transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.

The post Avatar etiquette: How Microsoft employees are using avatars for Microsoft Teams in their meetings appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Half of workers have gone back to the office, but much of our collaboration with others is still being done in online meetings. Clearly, the hybrid workplace isn’t going anywhere. Many organizations have tried hard to figure out a structure to accommodate their employees from wherever they dial in—whether it is executive boardroom or their back porch. But it’s a big jump from diagnosing the challenges to devising solutions that enable people to connect more deeply in online meetings.

There’s no doubt that we’re a hybrid company here at Microsoft. Our colleagues are more distributed and diverse than ever before. This is why we built Microsoft Mesh, a 3D immersive space built into Microsoft Teams. Teammates show up as avatars and interact with one another in real time in the same virtual space.

We wanted to get immersive spaces right for ourselves here at Microsoft and for thousands of organizations that need flexible hybrid solutions. And in effort to solve complex challenges with nuanced technical solutions, we have had to learn along the way.

One way we do this is by receiving and incorporating feedback from our own employees before we release products to the public, a concept we call Customer Zero. Immersive spaces benefited greatly from this cycle of refinement.

[Discover what we learned about avatar etiquette. Get the story on our role as the company’s Customer Zero.]

Collaborating beyond the grid

“The future of distributed collaboration is more than the video grid,” says Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms, who shared his view in a LinkedIn post announcing the public preview of Mesh.

“(Mesh) is a step forward for us all to learn together,” Teper says.

Immersive spaces allows participants to connect more naturally. You can bond with coworkers as you toss bean bags, sit by the firepit, or gather on couches in a lake house—all within Teams accessible via PC or VR headset.

Hybrid work is now the norm, with people from the same team working remote from many different locations. We’re no longer having those authentic moments during or in-between working sessions to socialize and create personal connection at work.”

—Alexandre Godin, principal product manager, Microsoft Mesh product team

Mixed reality products had been brewing for years with products like HoloLens, but the pandemic massively accelerated this work.

“Hybrid work is now the norm, with people from the same team working remote from many different locations,” says Alexandre Godin, a principal product manager who helped build Microsoft Mesh from its inception. “We’re no longer having those authentic moments during or in-between working sessions to socialize and create personal connection at work.”

The geo-diversity of our teams has made finding connection on our Teams calls as important as it’s ever been. Immersive spaces fills that void and enables teammates to easily and more naturally interact with each other virtually.

“It feels like I don’t need to wait for my turn to have a conversation,” Godin says. “You get to interact in a much more natural way with a sense of physical togetherness in this 3D space.”

For the first time, it’s really easy to use and is accessible to everyone in Teams. I’m not here and you’re there; we are all here together in virtual reality.

—Sara Bush, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

It’s creating a new way to communicate.

“For the first time, it’s really easy to use and is accessible to everyone in Teams,” says Sara Bush, a principal product manager for the team in Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company’s IT organization. “I’m not here and you’re there; we are all here together in virtual reality.”

Impressive spatial audio

Everyone who has tried immersive spaces agrees that this virtual world’s coolest feature and biggest brain-bender is spatial audio.

“As you could in reality, you can move away from the cluster of folks you’re talking to, or the main meeting environment, and the audio will reflect that,” says Bush, an 11-year Microsoft veteran who helped deploy Teams across Microsoft in 2018.

“You’ll get a visual notification on your screen, and you will notice the audio fade out and you can no longer hear those people that you were standing with,” she says. “But now you can hear this other group that you’ve walked over to. This experience is more akin to being together physically.”

Participants can also have side conversations and communicate effectively in subgroups without talking over each other.

“Spatial audio is amazing,” Godin says. “It really does feel like you’re in the room by mimicking real audio behavior, and it helps capture nuances and non-verbal cues that don’t always come through in standard online meetings but are so important for the group dynamic.”

Flexible, inclusive, effective

Work in the hybrid era is about flexibility and accommodation for productivity.

“We each have our own work style,” Bush says. “Sometimes you want to come into the office to collaborate and to have face-to-face engagement. Sometimes you want to focus in a way that you can’t in the office but can at home. This gives us the best of both worlds.”

It also allows for different types of meetings for different kinds of people, boosting communication and coordination. For example, an introvert who thrives on one-on-one conversations can find a cozy nook, have a side conversation, then rejoin the group. It also helps capture nuances that might not come through in a video call only.

“It really makes a huge difference in how people interact and participate in a session,” Godin says. “It helps them connect with co-workers in a more natural and deeper way that resembles what would happen if everyone was physically together.”

Immersive spaces lets people show up the way they want, which makes them feel included, engaged, and connected. It works regardless of each participants’ location, title, and learning type, making for a more equitable and inclusive working environment.

It’s a technological solution to physical space realities and limitations.

—Sara Bush, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Immersive spaces can be used to encourage and enhance social interactions during employee orientations, training, professional development, and networking events.

“It’s a technological solution to physical space realities and limitations,” Bush says.

Internal feedback shapes product design

Microsoft’s robust program for internal testing, known as Customer Zero, has played an essential role in helping to shape immersive spaces. Employee testing and feedback helped refine and improve the product before it was released to the public.

In fact, feedback from our colleagues testing and using pre-release features or products is fundamental to the company’s mission and momentum. Microsoft employees can try out, pressure test, and identify bugs in the software while it’s still in beta, raising early flags about a product’s user experience. Each group that evaluated immersive spaces passed along critical feedback and information about their experiences.

“We want to make sure we’re looking at things from the customer’s point of view, which is why we have a great system where our internal early adopters can test and evaluate products and report any issues,” says Rachel Castillote, a senior product manager leading the Teams Early Experience service in Microsoft Digital. “This critical feedback is necessary to ensure these experiences are diverse and inclusive across many different learning types, geographies, and user journeys. That turns into diverse experiences and products that are going to delight our customers.”

The Customer Zero framework was particularly helpful when developing immersive spaces.

“It’s a whole new experience, so it was really cool to witness our internal early adopters evaluating and validating it for the first time,” Castillote says. “It was great to be able to see people in avatar form in this virtual environment that mimics many of the aspects of real life and just exploring the space, moving around in the space. We got to experience the awe, the wow factor of the participants, which was very validating.”

It’s more casual. More intimate. And that opens us up to more collaboration and connection.

—Laura Oxford, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

One beta tester of immersive spaces was skeptical at first.

“Of course, it was a little unusual at first, because you’re in a meeting room with people, but we’re not actually in a meeting room,” says Laura Oxford, a senior content program manager in Microsoft Digital. “But it really did feel like we were in a space together.”

The fact that it was done without virtual reality headsets or equipment is a big plus.

“It’s all just on Teams on the computer, yet it gives you that sense of social connection,” Oxford says. “It’s more casual. More intimate. And that opens us up to more collaboration and connection, and that engagement enhances any kind of remote or hybrid team experience.”

We are continuously gathering details and feedback that help us validate our products. Our products go through an agile and iterative process, so we’re constantly iterating based on the feedback that we get from our participants.

—Rachel Castillote, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Next steps for next-level engagement

The immersive spaces team has applied lessons learned from all the mixed-reality products that came before it.

“Feeling co-present is key. Being in the same place and having shared experiences, whether it’s fun or work focused, or both, is really important,” Godin says. “There is a ton of value in asynchronous communication or video calls, but sometimes you really need to get together in a room to create that deeper engagement and connection that will make a difference for the team to achieve their goals together.”

Mesh immersive spaces really offers something kind of magical and special as we’re all feeling we’re there together.

—Alexandre Godin, principal product manager, Microsoft Mesh product team

Continuing the virtuous circle of feedback from early adopters won’t stop anytime soon, according to Castillote.

“We are continuously gathering details and feedback that help us validate our products,” Castillote says. “Our products go through an agile and iterative process, so we’re constantly iterating based on the feedback that we get from our participants.”

‘Magical and special’

Most early participants in immersive spaces say there’s an ineffable quality that has to be experienced, particularly the spatial audio component.

Castillote is excited about the possibilities still to come.

“It’s a whole other realm that we’re headed to, and a whole new option for how you want to show up in the hybrid workplace,” she says. “Do you want to show up in person? Do you want to show up in avatar form? Do you want to show up in avatar form in the immersive space? Like, where are we having our meeting today?”

And oh yeah, it’s good for networking as well.

“I know from experience building that social connection from teams takes a lot of work, even when everybody’s in the office together,” Oxford says. “Social connections are important for having more effective meetings and relationships.

Her advice?

“Be open to it,” Oxford says. “Have fun with it—that’s exactly what it’s for.”

In other words, meet you by the firepit to roast marshmallows.

To get started with immersive spaces in Microsoft Teams, follow these steps:

Find the version for you

Ensure you have the right licensing for immersive spaces. Supported paths include:

• Smaller Businesses: Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium.
• Larger Enterprises: Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Office 365 E1/E3/E5.
• Your computer has a 4 core CPU and at least 8 GB RAM.
• Your admin has enabled Mesh in the Teams admin center.

Access immersive spaces

• Sign in to Teams on your desktop.
• Go to your Calendar on the left side of Teams.
• Locate the meeting you want to join and select Join.
• From the meeting menu at the top, choose View > Immersive space (3D).

Microsoft Mesh will begin loading, and you’ll enter the immersive space pre-join screen.

Explore and socialize

Within the three-dimensional environment, you can:

• Socialize and connect: Have multiple simultaneous conversations and communicate effectively in subgroups without talking over each other.
• Collaborate: Even if some participants join from outside the immersive space, they can see, hear, and interact with others within it.
• Screen sharing: If anyone shares their screen, the content is visible to all meeting attendees.

Customize your avatar

Select + or the pencil icon to create or customize your avatar.

Adjust audio settings: Fine-tune your audio device from the pre-join screen.

Immersive spaces work well for various types of meetings, including:

• Weekly scrums or standups with your team.
• Brainstorming sessions with multiple breakout groups.

This feature is currently available on the Microsoft Teams desktop app for Windows and on Mac up to R3. It is not yet supported on Teams on the web or Teams mobile.

To get started and learn more, check out the official Microsoft support documentation or explore the Microsoft Mesh overview.

• Discover what we learned about avatar etiquette.
• Get the story on our role as the company’s Customer Zero.
• Read more about Microsoft Teams Premium.
• Learn more about Microsoft Mesh.

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 Bonding in 3D: How Microsoft employees are finding connection in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When much of the world started working from home and many companies adopted a hybrid work model, we here at Microsoft began rethinking the way we meet and enable quality hybrid meeting experiences in all sizes and types of conference rooms.

When you’re upgrading a boardroom, it’s got to look fantastic and you have to get everything just right.

— Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team, MSD

One of the most important meeting room scenarios that we tackled and knew we had to get exactly right, was the executive boardroom.

“When you’re upgrading a boardroom, it’s got to look fantastic and you have to get everything just right,” says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team in Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company’s IT organization. “It’s got to be thought through from every angle—acoustics, aesthetics, etc.”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T8LdrWaank, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Here at Microsoft, our team in MSD worked with our partners in Global Workplace Services (GWS), our real estate organization, and the Microsoft Teams product group to build a new meeting room experience for executives that acknowledges the new post-pandemic world leaders are now working in.

“Every customer was being asked by their CEO, ‘What do we need to do to my boardroom so I can meet in it again,’” Hempey says. “They were telling their IT teams, ‘My old conference room is just not working for me now that I’m used to meeting on Teams. When I was working at home, we all worked on Teams and could see and hear each other. Now that I’ve gone back to the office, I can’t see or hear people who aren’t in the room, and they can’t see or hear people who are here in the room with me.’”

Signature Teams Rooms is our base high value product—it’s our regular-size conference room where we create a high-quality experience by controlling elements like furniture, finishes, technology, how people are sitting. The boardroom takes that one step further because it’s where the stakes are highest. It’s where you have high-value meetings where you can’t afford for stuff to go wrong.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, MSD

A fix was needed, and quickly.

We used our on-campus meeting room laboratory, The Hive, to develop a solution, the Signature boardroom experience in Microsoft Teams Rooms, our Microsoft Teams meeting room product. The Signature boardroom experience is a combination of thoughtful physical design and ground-breaking use of technology. It helps meeting attendees feel connected to the meeting no matter where they join from.

The Signature boardroom experience is unique because of its high profile and its size.

“Signature Teams Rooms is our base high value product—it’s our regular-size conference room where we create a high-quality experience by controlling elements like furniture, finishes, technology, how people are sitting,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager in MSD. “The boardroom takes that one step further because it’s where the stakes are highest. It’s where you have high-value meetings where you can’t afford for stuff to go wrong.”

We spent eight months getting the Signature boardroom experience “just right,” and first deployed it in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s conference room at the start of this calendar year. Now we’re gradually rolling it out to other executive meeting rooms as we’re able.

Across the entire company, we’re embracing the hybrid work culture. That’s true of our leadership team, too. It was important to us to make sure our Senior Leadership Team’s meetings were productive by providing them with the best possible hybrid meeting experience.

— Greg Baribault, group product manager, Microsoft Teams

The need for a Signature boardroom experience came from the way work changed after the pandemic.

“Across the entire company, we’re embracing the hybrid work culture,” says Greg Baribault, group product manager for Microsoft Teams and head of product for the team that builds Microsoft Teams meeting room systems. “That’s true of our leadership team, too. It was important to us to make sure our Senior Leadership Team’s meetings were productive by providing them with the best possible hybrid meeting experience.”

Getting technical

Bigger than our typical Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms, the Signature boardroom experience is designed for 16 to 30 people. Its size and complexity required that we make a lot of decisions about what technology to put in the room and how it would work. Specifically, the team at the Hive worked closely with top audiovisual partners to evaluate, deploy and program the Microsoft Teams certified cameras, microphones, speakers and display technologies.

For example, bigger rooms also made it more important to make sure everyone can see the Teams meeting on the display, like shared content and the hand raise and chat panels from anywhere.

In the boardroom, we want to include everyone—people online, people in the room, the room itself. We want everyone to feel like they can connect with any other person in the meeting.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, MSD

And just like in many executive boardrooms, there’s a wall of glass that brings in a lot of natural light, so another important design consideration in choosing a display technology that people can see even when it’s full daylight. “That’s how we landed on a large direct view LED video wall, and it’s only at 30 percent of its potential brightness,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive.

The video wall is an ultra-wide display and measures nearly 12 feet by 5 ½ feet and remote participants appear life-size, as if they’re sitting opposite the in-person participants. This is important because the boardroom experience must be equitable and inclusive for all participants, whether remote or in-person.

“In the boardroom, we want to include everyone—people online, people in the room, the room itself,” Marzynski says. “We want everyone to feel like they can connect with any other person in the meeting.”

That also leads to the unique table shape of our executive boardroom. The Boardroom archetype is ideally designed with a U-shaped table, open on one end to the front of room displays so the remote participants appear there. That said, the Signature boardroom experience is flexible and can support oval and rectangle tables as well, which is important because you can’t aways change out your tables, even for executive boardrooms.

“The circle of inclusion now includes the screen with remote participants at the same height as everybody sitting at the table,” Marzynski says. “It’s almost like they’re virtually in the room with you. Everybody is seated in a way that welcomes in these participants.”

All of the cameras in the room can pan, tilt, and zoom for a cinematic experience, similar to a multi-camera television show.

“The biggest piece of feedback we got from the old version of the room was that we could see everyone—except if they were standing in the front of the room presenting,” Hempey says. “Some in our senior leadership team are mostly remote, and seeing the face of the person standing at the front of the room is really important to their experience.”

The solution was several cameras, which work together with microphones in the ceiling to figure out who’s speaking, and then the appropriate camera can focus on that person.

“You can’t deploy just a single camera in a space of that size,” Albert says. “You need multiple cameras placed strategically around the room to get the best view of every seat at the table and presentation spaces.”

Reading the room

Reading the room is another challenge in a hybrid meeting, as you can’t always tell what body language people are displaying. If there was just one camera view, then you would only see the person who’s currently speaking. But with multiple cameras, one is assigned to provide a view of the room as a whole.

“There’s one camera dedicated to providing the context view, like picture-in-picture, overlaying a picture of the entire room over the people who are talking,” Marzynski says. “That way even if one or two people are talking, you have a chance of seeing how the rest of the room is reacting. And that is really, really powerful.”

You might think all these cameras would be an intrusive presence. And you’d have been right for an earlier iteration of the room, in which the cameras all “woke up” at the same time and created an unnerving feeling of being surveilled for in-person participants. However, the cameras are now much more unobtrusive, thanks to a lot of collaboration with GWS on finishes. The cameras are now in colors that match the ceiling and walls where they’re located, so they provide a great user experience without calling attention to themselves.

Our boardroom works exactly the same way as every other meeting room at Microsoft. It’s just another Teams Rooms meeting room—it uses the same kind of computer to run the meeting. Yes, it has additional capabilities, yes, it has a much bigger screen, yes, it has these crazy cameras. But from your perspective as a person joining the meeting, you start the meeting the same way as every other meeting room. It combines incredible power with a super simple user experience.

— Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team, MSD

The speakers are also top-of-the-line and were designed to support the new Teams Rooms spatial audio experience. The MSD team installed speakers in the front of the room and just below the video wall, additions complemented by existing overhead speakers. This array of speakers makes it so remote participants are heard as if their voice is coming from where they appear on the screen.

Despite the technological complexity of the boardroom, our team made sure its user experience is comparable with other Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.

“Our boardroom works exactly the same way as every other meeting room at Microsoft,” Hempey says. “It’s just another Teams Rooms meeting—it uses the same kind of computer to run the meeting. Yes, it has additional capabilities, yes, it has a much bigger screen, yes, it has these crazy cameras. But from your perspective as a person joining the meeting, you start the meeting the same way as every other meeting room. It combines incredible power with a super simple user experience.”

All that technology required a lot of collaboration with GWS. Their team helped with making sure the electrical outlets were powerful enough to support all the new components, including the cameras, microphones, and display. They also needed to make sure the HVAC system was strong enough to keep the room comfortable with the huge video wall emanating heat. In addition to that, they handled architecture, permitting, and defining standards for acoustics, lighting, table shapes, and furniture layouts.

Creating the boardroom

Building the Signature boardroom experience was challenging.

“We didn’t start with the Microsoft boardroom,” Albert says. “We started with some functional mockups in found spaces. It was before the campus was fully opened, and we borrowed some spaces that were about the same size.”

After experimenting with those spaces, the MSD team found executives to “dogfood” the experimental room setup.

The work started at The Hive, our incubation space on Microsoft campus where life-size prototypes can be built and tested.

“One of the best things about The Hive is the ability to very rapidly prototype and fail fast on space design, the overall design of the experience,” Baribault says. “They [the MSD team] like to try a lot of different things, and there’s an experimentation process they go through. That’s a process you can go through in a space purpose-built for that. You can’t really do that in a high-end executive boardroom. The Hive’s been a tremendous asset for us the last few years as we’ve learned about hybrid work.”

It’s a place where we blend software with the physical world.

“We have this unique working area in The Hive that I like to call ‘phygital,’” Marzynski says. “Phygital is about delivering a digitally enhanced experience in a physical location—it’s where we combine meeting furniture, ambiance, and everything you feel in a meeting room with technology.”

The “phygital” concept is about using the power of software to avoid spending lots of money on physically rebuilding your meeting rooms.

“The technology adapts to the physical environment, not the other way around,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for MSD. “The technology is flexible enough to work within the constraints of the room to save time and cost, as the cameras can be configured to work with any existing furniture and fixtures.”

Getting to success

The hard, and sometimes nail-biting work of getting the Signature boardroom experience ready has been well worth the effort.

“It took our teams around 10 months to build, test, and iterate to create our Signature boardroom experience,” Sherry says. “We were able to take all our learnings from multiple buildouts and technology solutions and consolidate them in to one archetype that provides a roadmap for creating new hybrid boardrooms that work right out of the box.”

And it’s paying off—it now takes only six weeks to upgrade an executive meeting space. “It went live in February and now it’s been over half a year, and by all accounts it’s been really successful,” Marzynski says. “We got nice kudos from one of our leaders—he was bowled over by it and said, ‘This is awesome!’ It was a really nice feeling.”

We plan to make the specs for building the experience available to customers soon.

We have a replica of the boardroom in our Executive Briefing Center, and it’s very popular with customers who visit us there. Some have even asked for the parts list so they can recreate exactly what Microsoft has done with the boardroom.

“In this case, we shipped software, but we also shipped guidance on how to get started,” Baribault says. “It became a collaboration in not just solving our own problem but creating a solution to help our customers as well. That was a new thing for all of us and I hope it sets a new model for the company.”

In addition to being critical for high-level meetings, an important aspect of boardrooms in general is that they are very expensive, not just to build, but to operate.

“The cost of operating a boardroom is really significant to our customers, because these types of rooms often come with specialized support because of their complexity,” Sherry says. “You’re often not relying on the company’s AV and IT support—you have a white-glove service, and if something goes wrong you pick up the hotline, and they’re there.”

Still, AI reduces the operating costs, because a person isn’t needed to switch cameras manually and check sound levels. That can be done in software.

“We always think of the cost of building a room, but you end up paying a lot more to operate the room than you did to install it,” Sherry says. “And that’s important to our customers.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Signature boardroom experience:

• Plan your deployment: Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to plan your deployment. You need to consider your room size, layout, equipment, network, security, and licensing requirements. You can use the Meeting room guidance for Teams article to help you design and optimize your meeting spaces with Microsoft Teams Rooms solutions and devices.
• Get familiar with the features: Microsoft Teams Rooms comes with a range of features that can help you make the most of your video conferencing experience. You can use the touchscreen console to join and manage meetings, share content, adjust audio and video settings, and more. You can also use voice commands to control the room with Cortana. You can learn more about the features and how to use them from the Microsoft Teams Rooms help & learning page.
• Configure and manage your devices: After you’ve deployed your Microsoft Teams Rooms devices, you need to configure and manage them to ensure they work properly and securely. You can use the Microsoft Teams admin center, PowerShell, or third-party tools to configure settings, update firmware, monitor device health, troubleshoot issues, and more. You can find detailed instructions on how to configure and manage your devices from the Microsoft Teams Rooms page.

Learn how to get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Signature boardroom experience.

• Discover how Microsoft uses Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Unpack deploying Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms, generative AI at new Microsoft Canada headquarters.
• Explore why we’re buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology internally at Microsoft.

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

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

The post Transforming the executive boardroom meeting experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms 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.

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

How do you get the most out of digitally transforming your company?

If you are an IT leader or an IT practitioner, you know that this is not an easy task.

You have to deal with complex and evolving needs for both your employees and your company.

We think we can help you with this by sharing how our approach to our own digital transformation here at Microsoft has evolved over time.

In this episode of our Inside Track Spotlight interview series, our Senior Business Program Manager Gabe Storment speaks with colleagues Ed Novak and Lisa Miniken on work our larger Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) organization is doing to transform our employee experience here at Microsoft.

There are three areas where we—Microsoft’s IT organization—are rethinking the experience our employees have at work: Culture, the cloud, and security.

Sometimes transforming your enterprise is about giving employees just the right access, and sometimes it’s about not showing them information they don’t need to see. Novak, a regional experience lead in MDEE, tied it together with an example from his first week at Microsoft.

“I plugged in my laptop to the wall, and I had access to everything at the company,” Novak says. “I was trying to clean up my workspace, and I ended up deleting all these source files. I had no idea, but I had access to data that I didn’t need to have.”

This unnecessary access is illustrative of how far we’ve come.

“Now we’re leveraging this identity in the device health to give you access to only the things that are relevant for your job,” Novak says.

To learn more, watch our video where we explore our transformation from a traditional IT organization to the modern digital organization today. Get tips for building partnerships across business units, understand the Shadow IT landscape at Microsoft, and learn about what surprises our customers when they meet with us.

One example that intrigues a lot of people we speak to is that there isn’t just one IT organization at Microsoft anymore. “We currently have our IT functions distributed across several organizations at Microsoft, and that’s something that is really unusual,” says Miniken, a senior business program manager with MDEE.

Learn more about how we approach governance in Microsoft 365 here at Microsoft.

• Learn more about our internal digital transformation here at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re rethinking our digital workplace here at Microsoft.
• See how we’re boosting our employee engagement at Microsoft with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
• Unpack how we use Microsoft 365 to bolster teamwork here at Microsoft.

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

The post Culture, the cloud, and security: learning from Microsoft’s digital transformation appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.]

As much as we might say we’re open to feedback from our peers, human nature can make it hard to have an open mind when it comes our way—it can feel too much like a threat. In fact, neuroscience shows our brain reacts to the term “feedback” in a way that often shuts down our ability to take in new information and learn.

At Microsoft, the company’s culture continues to shift to learn more from others, so it’s crucial to deliver—and capture—other people’s perspectives in constructive ways.

“We wanted to get past the instinctive defense mechanisms that our mind has when people say they want to give us feedback,” says Liz Friedman, a senior director in Microsoft Human Resources. “If we can do that, then we become more willing to listen to perspectives our colleagues have for us—people want feedback, it’s just sometimes hard to hear.”

Solving that challenge meant getting inside people’s heads.

“That’s why we studied what happens in the brain when someone says they want to give you feedback,” she says. “We wanted to learn how to encourage brain-friendly behaviors that open us to giving and getting feedback.”

Brain science (and early findings at Microsoft) show that people are more receptive to feedback when they ask for it. “It puts our brain in a more reward-oriented state that allows us to be more open to learning,” Friedman says.

It was clear that a new approach was needed; one that fit into a larger, company-wide culture shift to encourage employees to build on each other’s work. The goal was to show employees that they can have healthy, open conversations with each other about what’s working and what they can do better.

In 2018, Friedman and her team reached out to their partners in Microsoft Digital and launched conversations about building a new feedback tool to help support this new overall approach.

Microsoft previously had a peer-to-peer feedback process through an online tool, but, by being routed through the tool, the feedback took an indirect path.

“Going from feedback provider, to a manager, and then to the employee made it harder and slower to get valuable insights to the employee who needed it most,” Friedman say. “It wasn’t as helpful as it could be. And our process didn’t go far enough in promoting brain-friendly behaviors like asking for feedback that we learned about in our research.”

The team initially questioned whether it should continue offering a tool that invited employees to give each other feedback, or if conversations should all happen offline. But, because feedback is so important to personal growth (90 percent of employees say giving and receiving feedback is valuable), the conversation quickly turned to how to open as many channels as possible for feedback, including building a tool that would make feedback more actionable without triggering negative feelings.

What resulted is the Perspectives tool, where employees are invited to suggest things that their colleagues should “keep doing” and actions they should “rethink.” The “keep doing” category offers the person giving feedback an opportunity to call out the person’s strengths and to suggest how they can leverage them further. “Rethink” suggests the person consider someone else’s perspective on how to approach something differently.

Perspectives includes a process for an employee to make specific asks about the kind of input they are looking for, which helps them be more effective in asking, and further dials down the threat, Friedman says. And feedback now goes directly to the employee without a supervisor reviewing and distilling it first, and it’s no longer anonymous.

“Now it’s truly peer feedback—you’re getting insightful comments directly from peers versus through your manager only,” says Jay Clem, whose team built the Perspectives application when he was general manager of Human Resources IT in Microsoft Digital. “Perspectives is focused on providing specific and actionable feedback to help you grow.”

The Human Resources IT team in Microsoft Digital team creates the tools and processes that HR uses to serve Microsoft employees. “We got involved because we saw an opportunity within Perspectives to build out even better employee experiences,” he says.

The team pulled in data from Workplace Analytics, which uses an employee’s calendar, interactions, and document sharing data to provide insights on work patterns—including who they work most closely with on a regular basis, and those that they don’t work with as frequently.

“Within Perspectives, we are able to serve up suggestions in the interface for a few more people that they might want to ask to give them feedback,” he says. “The idea is to suggest people they wouldn’t normally think of.”

Clem and his team were among the first to pilot the new approach. He recalls when a colleague suggested he had missed an opportunity to work with a Power BI team in the company’s legal department.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I don’t think they would have shared what they shared with me without this new approach,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a total blind spot for me.’ I corrected it, and I felt safe to do it, and I appreciated it.”

It’s a feature that has been widely appreciated.

“It makes it easy to ID a wider assortment of people whose perspective may be valuable, and this helps support the macro view that you learn best when you get input from a more diverse group of colleagues,” Friedman says.

The Perspectives tool is a key element of the approach but is only one part in the company’s journey to improve the way employees give each other feedback. “It takes time to shift culture and this is just one way, though a valuable one, to help us get there,” Friedman says.

To learn more about why Microsoft HR rolled out the Perspectives tool, read Kristen Roby Dimlow’s blog post on the topic. Dimlow is corporate vice president of Microsoft Human Resources Total Rewards and Performance.

Here are some of the top things we learned deploying the Perspectives feedback approach here at Microsoft:

• Microsoft’s culture is founded in growth mindset and the importance of learning from others, so it’s crucial to seek and capture other people’s feedback in constructive ways.
• Neuroscience shows our brain reacts to the term “feedback” in a way that often shuts down our ability to take in new information and learn, so Microsoft’s “Perspectives” initiative encourages brain friendly behaviors that open us to giving and receiving feedback.
• Perspectives focuses on the importance of seeking and providing feedback in all channels, and includes an internal tool that was built to capture peer-to-peer feedback across the company – allowing employees to directly access perspectives they receive and removing anonymity from the experience.
• Piloting the Perspectives tool internally led to insights that helped improve the experience in advance of a company-wide launch in 2018.

• Explore prioritizing accessibility at Microsoft with feedback from people with disabilities.
• Unpack Viva la Vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.
• Discover Microsoft workers’ council partnerships boost the company’s product and service rollouts.

The post Brain-friendly employee feedback turning the tide at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.