Our employees at Microsoft are already using Microsoft 365 Copilot to find answers, work faster, communicate more effectively, and boost their creativity. Copilot has become a true personal AI assistant.

To make this tool even more valuable to our employees and users at all companies, we’re creating new agents with specialized AI-powered skills and capabilities built around specific needs and use cases.

An agent specializing in workplace services—starting with HR and IT—is now available as part of a private preview our customers can sign up for here, with support for additional services (such as Facilities) coming soon. The public preview will be available in the first quarter of 2025 and general availability is scheduled for the second quarter of 2025.

Our team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, has played an integral role in building and piloting the Employee Self-Service Agent. In addition to co-developing it with the Copilot product group, we’re also serving as its Customer Zero, meaning we’re the first company to use it. As such, we rolled out early versions of it to our HR and IT professionals and wove their feedback into the product.

“We’re very pleased with the results we’ve seen in both HR and on the IT side in the support space,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “These agents aren’t just speeding up how our teams help employees get the answers they’re looking for, but they’re also giving employees better answers right from the start.”

Augmenting employee self-service with intelligence

At Microsoft, AI has created new possibilities that support our culture of enabling employee self-service, especially in HR and IT. In a survey by our Microsoft 365 Copilot Research Hub, our employees said they’re spending too much time and energy searching for policy related information and navigating siloed systems to complete simple tasks related to their professions.

Like most companies, our HR and IT employees work in complex enterprise environments where they need to take action or find information across hundreds of tools and content repositories. When an employee can’t discover the information they need or accomplish crucial tasks, they’ll typically take one of two routes: They’ll either do without a service or file a ticket for support. The former leaves the employee unsatisfied, and the latter takes up valuable HR and IT staff time.

As industry leaders in HR and IT, and as the creators of Microsoft 365 Copilot, we designed the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot to take on these well-known challenges.

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot gives users the right answers at the right time with context-tailored responses grounded in official content sources. Through natural language queries on key HR and IT questions that they input into the Microsoft 365 Copilot interface of their choice or a company site, the assistant empowers them to quickly locate the resources or tools they need.

“The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot reorients problem-solving from a tool-based focus to a task-based focus,” says Kyle von Haden, principal PM manager for the Employee Self-Service Agent team in the Copilot product group. “It allows somebody to think about the problem they’re trying to solve and just express that rather than thinking about what tool they’ll need to do it.”

When an employee makes an inquiry, the agent connects to SharePoint and other knowledge sources and additional responses can be retrieved from our Microsoft Graph. When needed, it can also retrieve and integrate data from SAP SuccessFactors or ServiceNow. From there, the agent provides the employee with an answer that creates a single, reliable starting point for them to resolve their query—clearly distinguishing between answers from official content and those from the broader Microsoft Graph data.

“It’s exciting to see the transformation of employee experience and support through generative AI with simple conversations,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, senior director leading the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence. “As Customer Zero for this new suite of capabilities, we take great pride in channeling our insights and past investments in improving the employee experience at Microsoft and for our customers into this new era of AI.”

The agent includes pre-configured prompts, responses, and templates for self-service use cases so admins can configure the tool with minimal effort and maximum impact for employees.In addition to SAP SuccessFactors and ServiceNow, it also includes other third-party software integrations built into Microsoft 365 Graph and Copilot Studio, which allows administrators to build new connections via Microsoft Cloud Services to streamline business processes.

Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Knowledge access

Guidance from official sources, custom tailored to the individual employee

Examples:

• Looking up company policies
• Finding team member anniversaries
• Identifying which training courses are due

Action-taking

Take action on key HR and IT issues directly from the Employee Self-Service Agent

Examples:

• Submitting time off requests
• Requesting a new computer
• Updating name and transferring direct reports
• Checking and remediating device compliance

Business agility

Reduced case volume and tickets back into HR and IT

Examples:

• Freeing up HR and IT agents from simple or easy to resolve tasks
• Improving employee satisfaction and productivity

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot provides employees asking for help in the HR and IT spaces with a single starting point for knowledge access and task completion.

Microsoft Digital has already implemented these capabilities in small-scale pilots, in partnership with our HR, IT, and product teams to ensure the agent balances utility with security and employee privacy.

“The tool needs to be able to segregate data properly while still presenting the information employees need from a variety of sources in one place,” says Poorvaja Lingam, a principal PM in Microsoft Digital responsible for enabling the IT function in the Employee Self-Service Agent. “Natural language means AI can detect the context that’s relevant for the action it needs to take.”

Those capabilities depend on a layer of connectors, agents, and plugins that loop the Employee Self-Service Agent into different content repositories, third-party apps, and tools. As the team responsible for much of the agent’s configuration and administration, Microsoft Digital’s Elite Builder group created these background elements through another Copilot extensibility tool: Microsoft Copilot Studio.

This tool, based on Microsoft Power Platform, lets low-code, no-code, or pro-code developers enhance Copilot with agents and build their own custom experiences. It’s the key to configuring the Employee Self-Service Agent to access the tools and repositories relevant to our internal organizations.

Similar to other enterprises, HR and IT are natural places for us to start with profession-based agents because of how resource-intensive and complex they are.

HR services, simplified

As an organization, our HR team balances a long list of priorities that support both employees’ needs and the company’s priorities.

“HR is harnessing the power of AI to support our exceptional employees in achieving their professional goals and aspirations, while also addressing needs that affect their livelihoods,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager of Digital Strategy and Innovation for HR. “These innovations are driving greater business agility and efficiency, ultimately creating more value for both our employees and the organization.”

There’s an almost dizzying array of solutions and information repositories that support those goals—from payroll to benefits to skilling and more. The HR team uses more than 100 tools to handle these functions.

“Within HR, responsibility for policies and documents does not rest with a single individual, but rather with multiple program owners who have different areas of expertise,” Ajmera says. “Employees need to be confident they’re getting the right information and taking the right action.”

With the sheer scope and complexity of our organization, employees can get lost or confused trying to find guidance on our HR portal. The Employee Self-Service Agent speeds up that process and minimizes the need to reach out to HR professionals.

Instead, all an employee needs to do is enter a natural language query through the interface of their choice. These queries can be articulated in the same conversational manner that an employee might use when speaking with an HR representative. They could ask it questions like:

• Can you tell me how to update my preferred name?
• Show me my pay stub and help me understand my benefits deductions.
• Do I have any training due?

Besides answering questions, the Employee Self-Service Agent can also help you complete tasks. For example, you could say, “Help me schedule time off in February.” To bring back a holistic response, connectors link the agent to common tools like ServiceNow, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors, and to public-facing knowledge bases and internal SharePoint sites, email correspondence on the topic, and any other Microsoft 365 Graph info. The intelligence of the assistant and the ability to find information or invoke tools to complete tasks within a single pane is a giant leap forward for our employees.

Compared with our pre-existing HR virtual agent, we’ve discovered that people within our pilot who use the Employee Self-Service Agent are 25% more likely to receive a correct response and, as a result, we expect they will be 31% less likely to create a support ticket.¹ Early reports suggest that knowledge discovery is getting faster as well.

Even though it’s still early days, the impact of the agent is clear.

“When people come to HR, they’re now getting responses that are faster and more personalized,” says Christopher Fernandez, corporate vice president in HR. “It’s great to see this positive impact—which is exactly what we are aiming for in enhancing the employee experience. This HR innovation would not have been possible without all the thoughtful work and close collaboration across Microsoft Digital and Product.”

Unburdening IT through AI assistance

Routine IT issues are time-consuming for both employees and IT professionals, with much of that inefficiency being tied to how their larger IT organizations function within their companies.

“For an employee to stay productive, they need to have a simple, accessible, and transparent support experience,” says Silvina Olkies, senior director of Global End User Support Services and Employee Experience in Microsoft Digital. “Having multiple entry points for support can lead to confusion and inefficiencies.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent is helping us move away from traditional bot, phone, and email support channels. Instead, employees have a single, intelligent entry point to IT. Although HelpDesk support is one of the primary scenarios for IT, the platform also facilitates self-help for other common questions like sign-in information, device status, or internal network connectivity.

The main value driver for the Employee Self-Service Agent is in providing an alternate default to human agents as a first touch. Instead, the platform can help users resolve the vast majority of questions and issues on their own.

The vision is that only the most pressing and complex problems—ones that genuinely require human intervention—will reach our support professionals. To streamline the process further, the entire experience will take place within a single, intelligent pane.

“Our vision is for the support to start and end in Copilot,” Olkies says. “From there, whether you resolve your issue through a comprehensive self-service experience, or you transition seamlessly to a live agent, you remain within a unified, streamlined interface.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent is already helping a small test group of employees get answers faster, reducing support incidents, and reclaiming time for agents to focus on more complex and interesting problems. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we conduct IT services.

Early results are extremely encouraging. To date, the overall self-help success rate has increased by 36%, while information discovery saw a 34% gain in self-resolution. Importantly, user satisfaction for the IT function grew by 18%. It’s clear that employees appreciate self-service experiences enhanced by AI.

Exploring the new frontier of AI-enabled employee self-service

The time savings and increased accuracy that the Employee Self-Service Agent unlocks don’t just benefit general employees. They also drive efficiency gains for HR and IT professionals themselves.

“Many join HR because they want to make a positive impact on others’ lives and contribute to a better workplace,” Ajmera says. “By answering routine admin queries, the Employee Self-Service Agent sets subject matter experts free from the day-to-day minutiae of people knocking on their doors, allowing them to provide meaningful consultation, enhancing their impact and satisfaction at work.”

Despite significant investment, HR program owners struggle with benefit utilization due to awareness and ease of use. The Employee Self-Service Agent improves utilization by providing relevant information when employees are engaged. For example, when an employee asks about their 401k balance, the system can also show their contribution rate and highlight any unclaimed company match.

Our experience in creating and implementing the Employee Self-Service Agent internally has provided valuable lessons for customers who want to adopt the solution. First and most importantly, it’s crucial to properly govern your data estate. That ensures a baseline of data safety thanks to Copilot’s adherence to data loss prevention policies and other guardrails.

“We’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting to ensure customers can easily configure and manage this solution, but it’s important to be thoughtful,” Krishnamurthy says. “A big bang approach might not be the best way to get started, but rather by asking pertinent questions about the initial scope, the areas you might want to start with, and who your audience should be.”

The product team has used these lessons to shape the solution itself. The Employee Self-Service Agent supports a phased roll-out that increases in complexity as an organization’s maturity progresses:

• An out-of-the-box experience facilitates a no-configuration, focused employee self-service lens for optimized responses to common HR and IT questions.
• The minimum configuration delivers answers to employees via official content sources and company-crafted answers where necessary, lowering search time and frustration while improving trustworthiness and administrative control.
• Additional configuration reduces cost and decreases time to value for HR functions, including company policies, employee profile management, payroll, and benefits and IT workflows like ticket management and live agent support.

“As your engagement with the solution deepens, we’ve made it easy to tell the agent where your authoritative content or data lives through templated connectors, then the tool will make sure it’s surfaceable,” von Hayden says. “There’s an ongoing process of continual refinement and improvement until you’ve fine-tuned the solution to exactly what your organization needs.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot demonstrates not just the power of AI but its elasticity. It represents the next step in tailoring AI to specific business needs to enrich culture, empower people, reshape processes, and accelerate performance.

“The technology is there,” D’Hers says. “Now it’s about applying it to real-world scenarios so it can help people achieve their best.”

Here are some tips for getting started with the Employee Self-Service Agent at your company:

• First, we suggest finding one or two of your biggest pain points and addressing those.
• Start on broad patterns to get horizontal scale. Seek out easy wins with less complexity to drive early value.
• Content is key: prioritize knowledge bases, accuracy, and content creation.
• Focus on continuous improvement through quality, accuracy, and user feedback.
• Make sure your content is accurate and well-governed.
• Take a data-driven approach where you clearly identify and communicate the primary volume drivers in your business.
• Ensure content excellence by prioritizing authoritative knowledge and implementing rigorous processes for accuracy, curation, and review.
• Work to keep your users within a single platform, which will enable you to provide them with a seamless self-help experience.
• Continuously enhance your response quality and accuracy by measuring and acting on user feedback.
• Start testing with your human agents who usually answer questions, effective, clean, and well-governed.

The out-of-the-box experience for the Employee Self-Service Agent for Microsoft 365 is currently in limited private preview. Sign up here to be included in the next phase.

• Find out how Microsoft’s pivot to generative AI is being fueled by its rich IT history.
• See how Microsoft Digital is leading AI transformation with an AI Center of Excellence.
• Learn how we’re redesigning how we work at Microsoft with generative 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 Boosting HR and IT services at Microsoft with our new Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Like our customers, we at Microsoft have a strong business need to address the new challenges created by remote and hybrid work. The internal adoption of Windows 11 is helping our company meet those needs, while enabling our employees to work smarter and more securely, regardless of where they are.

Moving Microsoft to Windows 11

1. Microsoft tries Windows 11 on for size and likes the fit
2. Unpacking Microsoft’s speedy upgrade to Windows 11 (this story)
3. Windows 11 boosts employee engagement at Microsoft
4. Employees are at the heart of Microsoft’s internal Windows 11 upgrade
5. Five key learnings from Microsoft’s Windows 11 upgrade

Upgrading to Windows 11 at Microsoft

Our priority in rolling out Windows 11 internally was to provide employees uninterrupted access to a safe and productive workspace while giving them a chance to try out the new operating system.

Introducing a new operating system, especially across a distributed workforce, naturally led to questions about device downtime and app compatibility. However, with established practices and evolved solutions in hand, historical obstacles became just that—a thing of the past. The rollout of Windows 11 at Microsoft was our most streamlined to date, frictionlessly delivering employees the latest operating system in record time.

What made the deployment of Windows 11 a success?

Over the past decade, our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms employee experiences, has worked closely with teams such as the Windows product group to improve how it runs Microsoft’s updates, upgrades, and deployments.

Whereas significant time and resources were once dedicated to testing app compatibility, building out multiple disk images, and managing a complex delivery method, processes and tools introduced during Windows 10 have streamlined upgrades and enabled the transformation to a frictionless experience.

Data from App Assure, a Microsoft service available to all customers with eligible subscriptions, shows the company had 99.7 percent compatibility for all apps in Windows 11—that eliminated the need for extensive testing. It also meant that employees’ Windows 10 apps work seamlessly in Windows 11. Additionally, Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Windows Update for Business eliminated the need for using more than one disk image and made it easier for employees to get Windows 11.

Our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team relied on the same familiar tools and process as a Windows 10 feature update to quickly deliver the upgrade to employees.

The upgrade was divided into three parts:

Plan: Identify an execution and communication plan, then develop a timeline

Prepare: Establish reporting systems, run tests, ready employees, and build backend services

Deploy: Deploy Windows 11 to eligible devices

It all starts with a good plan

We at Microsoft Digital Employee Experience have a successful history of deploying new services, apps, and operating systems to employees. And it all starts at the same place—creating a disruption-free strategy that enables employees to embrace the latest technology as soon as possible without sacrificing productivity.

Assess the environment

Before the deployment of Windows 11 could begin, we had to take a careful inventory of all devices at Microsoft and determine which they should target. Windows 11 has specific hardware requirements, and a percentage of employees running ineligible devices meant that not every device would be upgraded. Employees with these devices will upgrade to Windows 11 during their next device refresh.

To evaluate the device population, we used Update Compliance and Microsoft Endpoint Manager’s Endpoint analytics feature. This allowed our team to generate reports on devices that either met or failed to comply with minimum specifications. For example, certain devices, especially older desktops, lacked the Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM) chipset requirements for security in Windows 11.

In the end, 190,000 devices were deemed eligible based on hardware and role requirements. Over the course of five weeks, our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team deployed Windows 11 to 99 percent of qualifying devices.

Address ineligible devices and exclusions

After evaluating the broad population of devices, our team developed a plan for devices that would not receive a Windows 11 upgrade. Since Windows 10 and Windows 11 can be seamlessly managed side-by-side within the same management system, we only had to designate the number of devices that would not receive the upgrade. Using Update Compliance to inform deployment policies, we applied controls on ineligible devices, automatically skipping them during deployment. These measures made it easy to know why a device didn’t upgrade, but also assured a disruption-free experience for both employees and those on our team responsible for managing the upgrade.

These controls also allowed the company to bypass deployment on any device that had been incorrectly targeted for an upgrade.

Ineligible devices. Windows 10 and Windows 11 can be managed side-by-side and will be supported concurrently at Microsoft until all devices are upgraded or retired. As devices are refreshed, more and more of our employees will gain access to Windows 11.

Devices that should not receive the upgrade. Other devices, like servers and test labs—where we validate new products on previous operating systems—were issued controls and excluded from receiving Windows 11.

Establish a deployment timeline

Once upgradeable devices were identified, our team was able to create a clear timeline. From this schedule, our communications team developed an outreach plan, support teams readied the helpdesk, and the deployment team developed critical reporting mechanisms to track progress.

For the deployment itself, our team used a ring-based approach to segment the deployment into several waves. This allowed us to gradually release Windows 11 across the company, reducing the risk of disruption.

Create a rollback plan

Windows 11 has built-in support for rolling back to Windows 10 with a default window of 10 days after installation. If needed, our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team could have revised this period via group policy or script using Microsoft Intune. Post-upgrade, there wasn’t much demand for a rollback, but the strategic release cadence that the team used, paired with the rollback capability, gave our team an easy way to quickly revert devices that might require going back to Windows 10 for a business need.

Preparing for success

Prior to starting the Windows 11 upgrade, we asked employees to complete pre-work needed for a successful upgrade. Because the upgrade was so smooth, only light readiness communications were needed. Instead, we focused on ensuring that employees were aware and excited about the benefits of Windows 11 and that they were ready to share their feedback on what it was like to use it.

Reach everyone

To maximize the impact of our communications, our team readied content that was digestible for every employee, regardless of role. Employees needed clear and concise messaging that would resonate, so that they could understand what Windows 11 would mean for them.

Our team in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience targeted a variety of established channels, including Yammer, FAQs on Microsoft SharePoint, email, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s internal homepage, and digital signage to promote Windows 11.

To generate interest, our materials focused on:

• The new look and features of Windows 11, designed for hybrid work and built on Zero Trust
• Flexible and easy upgrade options, including the ability to schedule upgrades at a time that worked best for the employee
• The speed at which employees could be up and running Windows 11, as quickly as 20 minutes
• New terms related to Windows 11 and where employees could go to learn more

An entire page on our company’s internal helpdesk site was dedicated to links related to the upgrade, including Microsoft Docs, where users could find a comprehensive library on new features.

Executive announcements from company leadership also conveyed the benefit of moving to Windows 11 and the ease with which it could be done.

Set expectations

Our team directed employees waiting to see if their device met Windows 11’s hardware requirements to the PC Health Check app. At an enterprise level, the team relied on Update Compliance to assess the device population.

We also used this opportunity to reinforce messaging to Windows 10 users—both operating systems would continue to operate side-by-side until all devices were refreshed. This helped ease concerns for employees who had to wait for an upgrade.

Ready support

Getting the deployment right wasn’t just about sending messages outward. Our team needed to receive and respond to employee questions before, during, and after the Windows 11 rollout.

Our support teams were given an opportunity to delve into Windows 11 prior to the deployment, which, based on experiences with previous upgrades, gave them time to categorize and group by severity any potential issues they might encounter. This familiarity not only helped them give employees informed answers, but also served as another feedback gathering mechanism.

Open for feedback

We run Microsoft on Microsoft technology and we encourage our employees to join the Windows Insider Program, where users are free to provide feedback directly to developers and product teams.

That’s why communications didn’t just focus on what was new with Windows 11, but on how feedback could be shared. If an employee had comments, they submitted them through a Feedback Hub where other employees could upvote tickets, giving visibility to our engineers in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience and the Windows product group.

Pre-work for deployment readiness

In addition to readying employees, we had to make sure all the backend services were in place prior to the deployment. This included building several processes, setting up analytics, and testing.

Establish analytics reports

Evolving beyond previous upgrades, the deployment of Windows 11 was the most data driven release we have ever done. Looking closer at diagnostic data and creating better adoption reporting gave our team clear data to look at throughout the deployment.

Using Microsoft Power BI, our team could share insights regarding the company’s environment. This better prepared everyone on the team and allowed us to monitor progress during deployment.

Our team captured the following metrics:

• Device population
• Devices by country
• Devices by region
• Eligibility
• Adoption

In addition to visibility into project status, access to this data empowered our team to engage employees whose eligible devices did not receive the upgrade.

Build an opt-out process

To accommodate users whose eligible devices might need to be excluded from the deployment, our team created a robust workback plan that included a request and approval process, a tracking system, and a set timeline for how long devices would be excluded from the upgrade.

Our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team released communications specifying the timeframe for employees to opt out, including process steps. Employees who needed to remove their devices from the upgrade submitted their alias, machine name, and reason for exclusion. From there, our team evaluated their requests. Only users with a business reason were allowed to opt out. For example, Internet Explorer 11 requires Windows 10, so employees who need that browser for testing purposes were allowed to remove their devices from the deployment.

Once we had approved devices for exclusion, a block was put in place to remove them from the deployment. Data gathered during the opt-out process enabled us to follow up with these employees, upgrading them to Windows 11 at a more appropriate time.

Create a security model

At Microsoft, security is always top of mind for us. A careful risk assessment, including testing out a series of threat scenarios, was performed before Windows 11 was deployed across the company.

Our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team built several specific Windows 11 security policies in a test environment and benchmarked them against policies built for Windows 10.

After testing the policies and scenarios to see if they would have any impact on employees, we found that devices with Windows 11 would meet Microsoft’s rigorous security thresholds without creating any disruptions. Just as importantly, users would experience the same behaviors in Windows 11 as they might expect from Windows 10.

The deployment

A decade ago, our efforts to deploy feature updates could be challenging, as we needed to account for different builds, languages, policies, and more. This required careful management of distribution points and VPNs prior to beginning deployment efforts in earnest.

When Windows 10 was released in 2015, our team used two deployment strategies: one for on-premises managed devices and one for cloud managed devices.

Today, the situation is much simpler.

Launched during the Windows 10 era, Windows Update for Business established some of the trusted practices that make product releases and feature updates a great experience for us here at Microsoft. Windows Update for Business deployment service introduces new efficiencies for our team, consolidating two deployment strategies into one.

For the deployment of Windows 11, our team had an advantage—Windows Update for Business deployment service.

Windows Update for Business deployment service enabled our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team to grab device IDs from across the environment and use them to automate the deployment. Windows Update for Business deployment service handled all the backend processing and scheduling for us; all we needed to do was determine the start and end dates.

Our team easily managed exclusions and opt-outs with Windows Update for Business deployment service, and when a device needed to be upgraded, the service made it easier to remove and roll them back to Windows 10.

Importantly, Windows Update for Business deployment service provides a single deployment strategy for us moving forward. Deployment has been simplified, and the data loaded into Windows Update for Business deployment service for this upgrade will help speed up future releases.

Policies for success

We had to decide which policies they wanted to work with for the greatest outcome. This included how many alerts an employee would receive before receiving an upgrade to Windows 11.

Windows Update for Business deployment services reduced the long list of policies that our team needed to manage during deployment. This accelerated deployment without compromising security.

From pilot to global deployment

By structuring the deployment timeline to hit a small group of employees before incrementally moving on to a larger population, our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team ensured Windows Update for Business deployment service ran as expected and that all required controls and permissions were set.

As our team used the Windows Update for Business deployment service to plot out upgrade waves, Windows 11 downloaded in the background and employees received pop-up alerts when their device was ready. The employee could restart at any time and would boot into Windows 11 after a few automated systems completed the installation. Employees could also schedule Windows 11 to upgrade overnight or during the weekend.

Onboarding OEMs

Working closely with Microsoft Surface and other Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partners, the companies who supply Microsoft with new devices, our team was able to ensure that our employees had Windows 11 pre-loaded onto their PCs. This approach guaranteed that new devices complied with the hardware requirements of the new system.

A new device, straight out of the box, only needs to be powered on and connected to the internet before Windows Autopilot authenticates and configures everything for the user. Once initial setup is complete, Windows Autopilot ensures that new devices are equipped with Windows 11 and all the correct policies and settings.
For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d4z5N5XCsA, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Entering the next stage of Windows at Microsoft

The deployment of Windows 11 at Microsoft validates our team’s approach to product releases and upgrades. With no measured uptick in support tickets, the deployment of Windows 11 has been a frictionless experience for employees and the wide adoption of new features confirms the value of the effort. The speed at which the team completed the deployment—190,000 devices in five weeks—represents the fastest deployment of a new operating system in company history.

We credit the success of this deployment to good planning, tools, strong communication, and the positive upgrade experience Windows 11 provides.

Windows Update for Business deployment service proved to be a big step in the evolution of how employees get the latest version of Windows. The service’s ease of use meant the team had a higher degree of control, flexibility, and confidence.

The tighter hardware-to-software ecosystem that comes with Windows 11 means our employees and all users of the operating system benefit from richer experiences. This, along with integration to Microsoft Teams, are just a few examples of what users are seeing now that they’re empowered by Windows 11.

• Understand the hardware eligibility requirements for Windows 11.
• The better you understand your environment the easier it will be to create a timeline, a communication plan, and ultimately track the deployment.
• Messaging is key for leaders in the organization to share, especially for adoption.
• Run a pilot with a handful of devices before deploying company wide. This will allow you to check policies for consistent experiences. Then move on to a ring-based deployment to carefully manage everything.
• There’s no need to create multiple deployment plans with Windows Update for Business deployment service; it can automate the experience, streamlining the entire workflow. Instead of waiting until everyone is ready, consider running Windows 10 and Windows 11 side-by-side. Prepare today by deploying to those who are ready now.

• Discover how Microsoft employees are leveraging the cloud for file storage with OneDrive Folder Backup.
• Explore how Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world.
• Check out enhancing VPN performance at Microsoft.

The post Unpacking Microsoft’s speedy upgrade to Windows 11 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Power Automate, part of the suite of tools offered by Microsoft Power Platform, is a low-code, cloud-based automation service powered by AI. In the company’s own words, Power Automate enables customers to streamline processes across their organization to save time and focus on what’s important.

While that might sound like corporate jargon, I can personally attest to its effectiveness. Power Automate has indeed helped my organization save time and focus on what matters most. By “my organization,” I’m referring to Microsoft itself—specifically, the Microsoft Charlotte Campus and the Blacks at Microsoft (BAM) Employee Resource Group. Power Automate has been essential in planning, organizing, and running our community service events, thereby amplifying their impact and continued viability.

As a senior software engineer at Microsoft, I specialize in data engineering, working on the systems that power Microsoft’s financials through big data analytics, revenue reporting, and product insights. Beyond my technical role, I’m also deeply passionate about giving back to the community through volunteerism. At the Charlotte campus, I’ve channeled this passion into organizing outreach and volunteer events, specifically focusing on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education.

Power Automate has been a game-changer in helping me maintain what I call work-life-volunteering balance. It allows me to stay focused on my primary work duties, keep a healthy personal life, and actively engage in my passion for service. Burnout, especially in tech, is a very real thing. By automating tasks that would have otherwise been overwhelming, Power Automate has helped me avoid burning out, ensuring I can excel at my actual job while still having an impact in my community. I’d like to share how it can help you do the same, but first, story time.

Building community through service

I joined Microsoft in 2020, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri, but decided to relocate to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Microsoft has an office and was looking to expand. (Fun fact: it’s the oldest Microsoft office outside of Redmond, established in 1990!) Relocating during the pandemic presented its own set of challenges. COVID had essentially shut down the city’s social scene and the Charlotte office, making it difficult to meet new people and coworkers. Having spent my first year in Charlotte mostly isolated, I was eager for opportunities to get out and connect with people, both at the office and in the city at large.

Knowing that volunteering is an effective way to build community, I quickly sought out opportunities to get involved, both through local nonprofits and at Microsoft. It didn’t take long to find calls for volunteers throughout the city. My first step was volunteering with a local nonprofit called the Carolina Youth Coalition, which focuses on propelling high-achieving, under-resourced high school students to and through college. As a mentor and writing tutor with the organization, I began looking for ways to connect the students—many of whom were interested in technology—with Microsoft’s presence in Charlotte.

Discover Days: The first big step

I started by investigating the possibility of bringing the students to the Microsoft Charlotte campus for a field trip. My hope was for a fun and informative day complete with a campus tour, networking opportunities, a hearty meal, and some cool swag for them to take home. When I reached out to Chemere Davis—Charlotte Campus Community Lead and BAM North Carolina Chairperson—to see if such a visit would be possible, I was met with an emphatic yes. At the time, it surprised me, still being new to Microsoft, but now, after four years with the company, I see it as a reflection of Microsoft’s genuine commitment to empowering local communities.

That fall, 50 Carolina Youth Coalition students visited Microsoft Charlotte, sparking an annual tradition and an ongoing series of similar events with other local schools, known as Discover Days. Since then, my involvement in STEAM education events in Charlotte through Microsoft and BAM has only grown.

As my volunteer commitments grew, finding a more efficient way to plan, run, and manage events became essential; Power Automate provided the perfect solution. This year, it was crucial in elevating our Discover Days series from isolated single-school visits to something even more impactful.

“When we used Power Automate to ping team members directly in Teams and remind them 1:1 to sign up for our recent Charlotte software engineering Day of Learning event, we saw registrations double overnight—even though we had already sent several emails to the members,” says James Bolling, a principal group engineering manager and Microsoft Charlotte campus director. “It’s clear to me that our team is living and working in Teams Chat and not email these days.”

Every year, the many worldwide chapters of the Blacks at Microsoft Employee Resource Group host an event called BAM Minority Student Day. The event provides a 1-day conference-like experience for underrepresented high school students, engaging them in activities that introduce them to STEAM careers. In 2024, I had the privilege of leading the BAM Charlotte edition of this event, which brought together 400 students and 40 educators from 21 high schools across the region.

While I was excited to take on the challenge of leading the event, I was concerned about how I’d be able to balance my work responsibilities, personal life, and volunteer efforts in a healthy way. Power Automate became key to making it all possible.

Making it happen with Power Automate

Here are some ways that Power Automate enabled us, as the BAM Charlotte chapter, to pull off our incredibly impactful 2024 Minority Student Day.

• Streamlining volunteer coordination: We integrated Power Automate with Microsoft Forms, Lists, Teams, and Outlook to automate the management of over 100 volunteers, streamlining role assignments, calendar invites, and communications. This ensured that each volunteer was informed of their responsibilities and schedule with minimal manual oversight. By doing so, the administrative burden on leads was greatly reduced, ensuring smooth coordination and a successful event.
• Reporting in real time: We linked Power Automate with Microsoft Forms, Lists, Planner, and Excel to generate and distribute reports on registration numbers, volunteer assignments, and task completion statuses. This gave our planning team the crucial data needed to make informed decisions as the event date neared, allowing us to adjust plans and resources to stay within capacity and budget constraints.
• Efficient task management: Through integration with Microsoft Planner, we were able to automate task assignments, progress tracking, and reminders. Tasks were assigned to the appropriate team members based on their roles, and automated notifications ensured that deadlines were met. This was crucial in managing the many moving parts of the event.
• Automating document handling: Power Automate worked in tandem with SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Adobe Sign to manage the flow of important documents, such as signed consent forms and event materials. We were able to automatically save documents to the correct folders, update relevant lists, and notify the appropriate team members, significantly reducing the risk of lost or misplaced documents and simplifying the administrative workload.
• Enhanced event promotion and engagement: We used Power Automate alongside Teams and Outlook to boost event promotion. Personalized messages were sent to Microsoft employees via the Teams workflow bot, creating a more engaging and direct line of communication. This approach increased overall engagement compared to previous years.

“I am incredibly impressed with Segun’s meticulous attention to detail and innovative use of Power Automate to streamline the planning and running of our Employee Resource Group programs, and especially our Minority Student Day and our summer mentorship program,” says Chemere Davis, a senior business program manager and chairperson of Blacks at Microsoft North Carolina. “His efforts significantly increased our efficiency, allowing us to focus on enhancing the experience and impact for almost 600 students in the past year.”

Check out the recap of BAM Minority Student Day in Charlotte in this LinkedIn post, and another example of Microsoft’s culture in Charlotte at our Give Fair also posted on LinkedIn

If you’re interested in using Power Automate to help your organization focus on what’s important and automate the rest, here are some resources to get you started.

Check out the Power Automate template gallery for ready-to-use, customizable workflows that offer a wide range of automation possibilities. Here are some templates that were helpful to our community event planning and organization efforts:

• Send an email to a responder after a Microsoft form submission
• Create a daily summary of Planner tasks by bucket
• Create a Planner task when a Microsoft form is submitted
• Microsoft form processing to Outlook and SharePoint
• Create a task in planner from Microsoft forms and a post Teams message
• Create a Planner task when a Teams channel post starts with “To do”
• Notifying a chat when Planner tasks change status
• Generate an Adobe sign agreement and get a signature
• Track Microsoft forms responses in Excel and notify through Teams and Outlook

If you don’t already have a license, go here to sign up for a free trial of Power Automate.

• Check out how we’re rethinking supplier content at Microsoft with Power Automate.
• Learn how we’re empowering and securing our citizen developers with the Microsoft Power Platform.
• Watch to see our tips on how to become a citizen developer on the Microsoft Power Platform.

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Business-to-business (B2B) and app-to-app (A2A) integration are imperatives in modern software solutions. Integration services use middleware technology that helps secure communication between integration points and data exchange between diverse enterprises and business applications. At Microsoft, our business demands integration across multiple independent software systems with diverse message formats such as EDIFACT, X12, XML, JSON, and flat file. Modern integration requires many modes of connectivity and data exchange, and includes the ability to connect:

• Two or more internal applications.
• Internal applications to one or more business partners.
• Internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) applications.

[Discover streamlining vendor assessment with ServiceNow VRM at Microsoft. Explore shining a light on how Microsoft manages Shadow IT. Unpack implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft.]

Building on a foundation of enterprise integration

For decades, we as a company have worked to integrate our business data internally and in business-to-business scenarios with partners, vendors, and suppliers. BizTalk Server has been a standard for integration services for us and our partners, providing a foundation for dependable, easy-to-configure data integration.

Our ongoing digital transformation is driving cloud adoption to move business resources out of datacenters. As data storage and application development has evolved, cloud-native solutions based on SaaS and PaaS models have predominated among enterprise applications in most industries. To meet the growing need to supply increased scalability, reduce maintenance overhead for infrastructures, and decrease total cost of ownership, our Platform Engineering team has increasingly moved toward cloud-based solutions for enterprise integration.

Transforming integration with Microsoft Azure

Our Platform Engineering team began investigating Microsoft Azure Integration Services as a potential solution for scalable, cloud-based enterprise integration. Integration Services combines several Microsoft Azure services, including Logic Apps, API Management, Service Bus, Event Grid, and Azure Functions. These services provide a complete platform that companies can use to integrate business applications and data sources. Our team began working with Integration Services to gauge feasibility, test integration scenarios, and plan for enterprise-scale integration capabilities on the platform.

Collaborating to improve Microsoft Azure Integration Services

Throughout the development process, our Platform Engineering team worked closely with the Integration Services product group to enhance and build connectors. This collaboration allowed us to suggest improvements to existing Integration Services functionality. This effort prompted the creation of two new Logic Apps connectors—SAP with Secure Network Communication (SNC) and Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP)—and enhancements to two existing Logic Apps connectors (EDIFACT and X12).

Examining our Azure Integration Services architecture

We in MDEE use all Microsoft Azure Integration Services components in its architecture to support end-to-end integration. Each component supplies an important part of the larger solution, including:

• API Management for APIs, policies, rate limiting, and authentication.
• Logic Apps for business workflows, orchestration, message decoding and encoding, schema validations, transformations, and integration accounts to store B2B partner profiles, agreements, schemas, and certificates.
• Microsoft Azure Event Grid for event-driven integration to publish and subscribe to business events.
• Microsoft Azure Functions for writing custom logic tasks, including metadata and config lookup, data lookup, duplicate check, replace namespace, and replace segments.
• Microsoft Azure Data Factory for processing low volume, large payload messages, ETL processes, and data transformation.

We used Microsoft Azure Front Door as the entry point for all inbound traffic and helped secure endpoints by using Microsoft Azure Web Application Firewall configured with assignment permissions for allowed IP addresses. Additionally, API Management enabled us to abstract the authentication layer from the processing pipeline to help increase security and simplify processing of incoming data.

We deployed the entire solution to an integration service environment, which supplied a fully isolated and dedicated integration environment and other benefits, including autoscaling, increased throughput limits, larger storage retention, improved availability, and a predictable cost model.

The following figure illustrates our solution’s architecture using Microsoft Azure Integration Services.

The solution architecture adheres to several important design principles and goals, including:

• Pattern-based workflows that enable dynamic decisions using partner information.
• Self-contained extensible workflows that can be modified and improved without affecting existing components.
• A gateway component to store and forward messages.
• Publish and subscribe services for data pipeline output.
• Complete B2B and A2A pipeline processing with 100 transactions per second throughput and message handling up to 100 megabytes (MB) per message.

Designing dataflow pipelines

Our dataflow pipelines perform processing for most of our business-data transformation and movement tasks. We designed the B2B and A2A processing pipelines using Logic Apps and Microsoft Azure Functions, processing documents in their native format and delivering them to line of business (LOB) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems such as Finance, HR, Volume Licensing, Supply Chain, and SAP.

• B2B pipeline. Electronic data interchange (EDI) documents such as purchase orders are brought in using AS2, processed using X12 standards, transformed, decoded and encoded using Logic Apps and Azure Functions, and then sent to the LOB app using the Logic Apps HTTP adapter.
• A2A pipeline. Documents such as XML/JSON come in using one of the built-in adapters including SAP, File, SQL, SSH File Transport Protocol (SFTP), or HTTP. The documents are debatched, transformed, decoded, and encoded using Logic Apps and Azure Functions, and then sent to the line-of-business system using the appropriate Logic Apps adapter.

Our integration solution used these pipelines in practical business scenarios across many lines of business at Microsoft, such as for volume licensing. A hardware manufacturer that includes Windows or Microsoft Office in their laptops submits an order for Windows or Office license to Microsoft’s ordering system, which sends the order details to our integration suite. The suite validates the messages, transforms them to IDoc format, and routes the IDoc to SAP using a data gateway for taxation and invoice generation. SAP generates an order acknowledgement in IDoc format and then passes it to the integration suite, which transforms the IDoc message into a format that the Microsoft ordering system will recognize.

Here’s another example from Microsoft Finance. An employee incurs an expense using a corporate credit card and the issuing financial institution sends a transaction report to the integration solution, which validates the message and performs currency conversion before sending it to Microsoft’s expense-management system for further approvals. After it’s approved in the expense-management system, the remittance transaction flows through the integration suite back to the banking system for payment settlement.

Capturing end-to-end messaging telemetry

We designed our solution to monitor message flow across the pipeline. Every transaction injects data into the telemetry pipeline using Microsoft Azure Event Hubs. The pipeline synthesizes and correlates that data to identify end-to-end processing status and recognize runtime failures. We built a custom tracking service that monitors and tracks important metrics for end-to-end workflows by using visual indicators on a dashboard. Accurate and readily available telemetry creates a more robust and reliable integration environment and improves the customer experience across pipelines.

We’ve realized several benefits across our integration environment, including:

• Increased scalability. Our integration solution processes millions of monthly transactions, including 10 million B2B, 2.5 million A2A, and 74 million hybrid cloud transactions.
• Improved quality of service. We used cross-region deployment with active-active configuration and thorough handling of faults to help achieve 99.9 percent in availability and reliability metrics.
• Reduced total cost of ownership. We’ve reduced monthly costs in Microsoft Azure by more than 40 percent with this iPaaS solution.
• Increased customer engagements. We’re working toward increasing Microsoft Azure Integration Services adoption by promoting this solution to our partners, vendors, and suppliers.

Microsoft Azure Integration Services has created an improved and more efficient integration environment for Microsoft. The increased scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of Azure Integration Services has moved our business into a better position to actively collaborate with and operate alongside our partners, suppliers, and vendors. We’re continuing to transform our integration services landscape with Azure Integration Services to keep pace with the rapidly changing modern business environment.

• Discover streamlining vendor assessment with ServiceNow VRM at Microsoft.
• Explore shining a light on how Microsoft manages Shadow IT.
• Unpack implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft.

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Microsoft is using Kanban to drive engineering improvement and streamline workflows at Microsoft.

In its simplest form, Kanban involves creating a set of cards that track manufacturing or other step-by-step processes. These cards, tacked to a corkboard, can be used to highlight trouble spots and avoid overcapacity. That latter quality helps Kanban users resist loading up a job with too many side tasks.

“I learned about Kanban when I was in the Marine Corps,” says Ronald Klemz, a senior software engineer manager for Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystems. “When I joined Microsoft, I could see how it applied to software engineering.”

As it turns out, Microsoft already had an internal Kanban evangelist: Eric Brechner, who has since started his own company, leaving behind an influential legacy and a must-read book.

[Learn how Microsoft uses Azure Resource Manager for efficient cloud management.]

Although Kanban at Microsoft had a toehold, most engineers still used “scrum” or “Waterfall” development frameworks. Both attempt to help teams manage and assign workloads. Scrums, for instance, consist of regular planning meetings followed by two week to month long sprints that are meant to complete a particular stage of work.

We had a need to really visualize our work, which scrums couldn’t provide. Another engineer said, ‘Hey, have you heard about Kanban?’ We did some research and decided this was a good fit.

—Jon Griffeth, software development engineer, Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystems

While plenty of good work has come out of scrums and Waterfalls, they are not always ideal for driving engineering improvement. In scrums, for instance, the regular meetings can be time consuming and even though scrums are designed to break big jobs into manageable pieces, teams can still become overwhelmed if customers add new requirements on the fly.

“At the start of each two-week scrum cycle, you’re expected to know everything that you’re going to do in those two weeks,” says Snigdha Bora, an engineering lead with Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms Microsoft. “But there are things that will happen in those two weeks that you can’t know in advance. All of that goes away with Kanban because it has no limitations or artificial boundaries of a week or two weeks.”

“We were having problems managing with scrums, and were constantly missing sprint conclusions,” says Jon Griffeth, a software development engineer and program manager for Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystems. “We had a need to really visualize our work, which scrums couldn’t provide. Another engineer said, ‘Hey, have you heard about Kanban?’ We did some research and decided this was a good fit.”

Whether built with simple paper tags or using more sophisticated software versions, a Kanban board shows rows of cards arranged in columns that represent stages of a project’s workflow. Each card contains a specific task and who is responsible for it.

One of Kanban’s most valuable aspects is that each column is designed to self-limit work in progress. If an extra card is added that exceeds the agreed upon limit of tasks, the column heading might light up red, indicating a possible bottleneck that could delay work.

“It helps to simplify the workflow, so people aren’t getting hit with all kinds of sudden, ad hoc projects,” Klemz says. “They’re able to focus on the agreed-upon workflow.”

Griffeth agrees.

“When we would want to add an item to the workflow, Kanban helped us have more objective conversations about what we could and couldn’t do,” Griffeth says. “It also brings accountability within the team, and people get to pick a task and run with it. Then, if they are done with it, they can go to the next item on the priority list.”

If you finish a model, you don’t have to go to the project manager and ask what needs to be done next. You can see what’s next right on the Kanban board, pick up the next step and run with it.

—Baala Arumugam, senior software engineer, Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystems

That last point underscores another advantage of how Kanban at Microsoft drives engineering improvement: Its visual nature makes it easy for someone who is a newcomer to a team, has been on vacation, or is a part-timer, to look at the Kanban board and immediately see what needs to be done.

“With Kanban, it’s much easier to pick things up if you’ve been gone for a couple of days or if you’re just coming into the team,” says Baala Arumugam, a senior software engineer for Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystems. “And if you finish a model, you don’t have to go to the project manager and ask what needs to be done next. You can see what’s next right on the Kanban board, pick up the next step and run with it.”

That is especially handy in a time when COVID-19 has essentially all Microsoft engineers working remotely, often in different time zones. With Kanban boards, often created with Microsoft Azure DevOps, they can always immediately see the status of a project.

Binu Surendranath’s team owns the tools, processes, and controls to ensure that Microsoft’s preferred suppliers and partners are paid in a timely way once invoices are approved. They also ensure tax and other statutory compliances globally, provide tax and statutory compliance information, and report payments to the Internal Revenue Service.

Those multiple workflows led to siloed work, with different members of the team unaware of what co-workers were working on, or how their work had an impact on others.

“Everybody had their own priorities,” Surendranath says. “If I’ve finished one part of the puzzle, I celebrate a victory. But that didn’t really make a dent in the overall project. We support global businesses that are expanding exponentially. Having common, quantifiable business outcomes for everyone to work towards became an obvious need.”

Kanban has helped his team create a more collaborative work environment while still giving engineers plenty of freedom for innovation and simplification to positively impact customer experience and business needs, Surendranath says.

Sounds good. But what about concrete benefits to Kanban at Microsoft? There are plenty.

“Gone are the days when we’d spend nine months on a quarterly update,” Surendranath says. “Now when you close and open Outlook, you have a new Outlook because of the frequent updates Microsoft makes to it and other apps. That takes a more agile development approach that Kanban works well with.”

The agility plays well with Microsoft customers, who like to see product improvements that are rapid and seamless. The same goes for the business expansion of Microsoft Azure and data center launches and announcements.

“From the time Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announces a roll-out, we have just a few weeks to get everything up and running,” says Surendranath. “Kanban has really enabled us to meet that need with a high level of confidence and transparency. Kanban dashboard enabled real-time transparency on progress of business priorities and allowed us to manage our OKR (Objectives and Key Results) closely and were able to drive our monthly business reviews more efficiently. We started bringing up the dashboard during our business reviews to give transparency to all global stakeholders, which eventually helped build stronger trust.”

Kanban also helps Microsoft teams more effectively manage and deploy global statutory laws and compliance, which can change rapidly with predefined timelines and in most cases are non negotiable.

Griffeth’s engineers, meanwhile, were assigned the task of creating a new purchase order workflow for a team in India.

“We tracked a lot of what had to be done in Kanban,” he says. “It helped us see where a bottleneck might be, such as the product owner flooding the first step of the process with a lot of requests, or if code validation becomes a problem.”

The result: A smoother process, happier customers, and a team that worked well together. The team also saw improved productivity because no one was spending time in scrum meetings or working as scrum master. Internal customers and business groups embraced real-time transparency, accountability, and predictability on engineering dependencies.

Kanban continues to be a learning process for Microsoft engineers using it, and it has not yet gained truly widespread acceptance. But it has shown a path to make software development faster and more trouble-free, while helping teams work together more effectively.

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MyOrder, an internal Microsoft legacy application, processes roughly 220,000 purchase orders (POs) every year, which represent $45 billion in internal spending at Microsoft. Until recently, MyOrder was a massive, monolithic, on-premises application. It was costly to maintain, difficult to update, and couldn’t be accessed without a Microsoft-authorized VPN.

MyOrder struggled every May, when traffic could double—or even triple—from 1,000 purchase orders per day to 3,000. When users submitted purchase orders through the ASP.net-based website during these high-load periods, they frequently saw response times as high as 30 seconds, if the application didn’t outright crash or freeze.

Even when it worked as intended, MyOrder’s user experience could be frustrating.

“MyOrder was wizard-based, so users advanced through the app in a particular sequence,” says Vijay Bandi, a software engineer on the MyOrder team in Microsoft Digital. “If you advanced to a point where you didn’t have the information for a required field, you were stuck. It was an awful experience.”

Elsewhere at Microsoft, engineering teams are moving old, monolithic applications to the cloud for increased efficiency, scalability, and security—not to mention vastly improved user experiences. With MyOrder showing its age, the MyOrder team decided it was time to follow suit.

[Learn more on Microsoft’s modern engineering transformation, how it’s embracing a cloud-centric architecture, and how it’s designing a modern service architecture for the cloud.] 

From server-based monolith to agile PaaS

MyOrder—which combined a front end, back end, and all related logic in one solution—was only half of the ancient, monolithic applications that comprised the legacy purchase order system. The other half was the Procurement Services Platform (PSP), a huge middleware services layer. PSP was comprised of about 60 smaller projects and 500 validation paths.

Built on top of PSP, MyOrder collected data from PSP and housed it in one of the 35 servers required to run the application. It was hosted in four separate virtual machines to support the load. The engineering team used a load balancer to distribute the load to each of the VMs. Caches were built into the servers, but because the caches were distributed among four different VMs, they were never in sync.

“Suppose a user creates a purchase order pointing to one server, and the request goes to the next server,” says Atanu Sarkar, also a software engineer on the Microsoft Digital MyOrder team. “In that case, the user could search for a PO but not find it if the cache isn’t updated.”

Fewer resources, greater flexibility with Azure

According to MyOrder Engineering Manager Rajesh Vasan, the team considered several platforms for the new solution before landing on Microsoft Azure.

“We looked at a standalone, private cloud instance of Service Fabric and at Azure App Service,” Vasan says. “Azure was expanding, though. They were investing a lot of time in PaaS (platform as a service) offerings, which meant that we could offload all the networking, configurations, and deployments to Azure, and just concentrate on the application code.”

That would be a welcome change compared to the old monolith.

“A change to a single line of code used to take so much time, because you needed to build the whole solution from scratch with thousands of lines of code,” Vasan says. “Debugging presented similar challenges.”

The legacy app also supported external services like SAP (Microsoft’s financial system of record) and Microsoft Approvals, plus some third-party integrations.

“All that functionality, all those integrations in one monolith, that was a problem,” Vasan says.

By moving to Azure, they could convert each individual function and integration into a single microservice.

“Let’s say I want to change the tax code for a specific country,” Vasan says. “In Azure, I know there’s one microservice that does tax code validation. I go there, I change the code, I deploy. That’s it. It’ll hardly take a week.”

The same scenario in the old software, he says, would take a couple of months.

Migrating databases without downtime

Creating that experience required careful consideration as to how the team would maintain the legacy app while building the new one and migrating from one to the other.

“The first step was building a single source of truth,” Vasan says. “We wanted to put all that data in the cloud so we had a single source for all transactional purchase order data.”

After the team moved the data onto Azure, they built connectors for existing and new components.

“Both the legacy service, which was an Internet Information Services (IIS) web service, and the new service, which would be Azure API components and serverless components acting as individual microservices, would connect to a single source of truth,” Vasan says. “That was the first step.”

The team then needed to decide which microservices to build and which to start building first.

“It gets tricky here,” Vasan says. “Some users were accessing data from the old app, so we had to sync back onto the old one as well, up to the point that all users were no longer using the legacy service.”

The team built APIs to access data and key microservices such as search and the user interface (which they completely remodeled using Angular). Next, they focused on building microservices that were directly related to purchase order processing.

After the team built the core microservices, they started moving tenants to the new infrastructure. By this point, they had eliminated PSP and its database entirely.

“That was a big milestone for us because while we were migrating tenants, we were also working to move everything to the new database,” Vasan says.

At that point, there was no duplicate data.

“We had our single source of truth,” Vasan says. “The entire PO processing pipeline was in the cloud.”

The team then began one of the more challenging aspects of the project: they released one of the microservices with A/B testing in place.

“One of our microservices would call the other microservices and the old PSP in parallel,” Vasan says. “After the call went through both, we compared the results to make sure they were consistent. We flighted this in the production environment until we found and fixed all the issues. Then we went live.”

The next step was designing administration and configuration.

“We completely rewrote all that into the new areas, plus another eight or nine microservices,” Vasan says.

By then, MyOrder was 100 percent Azure, with no legacy components at all.

The benefits of microservices

The MyOrder team leaned on several Azure offerings to create the new infrastructure, including Azure Data Factory, Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Cognitive Search, and Azure Key Vault. The new, modernized version of MyOrder consists of 29 Azure microservices that are “loosely coupled and follow the separation of concern principle,” Vasan says.

Like the POE (Proof of Execution Procedure) service for PDS (Procurement Data Source) migration example, the microservices architecture made modifying existing capabilities and adding new ones relatively easy. Because it’s built on Azure, it’s highly scalable, so adding new tenants is much simpler.

The team is most thankful, though, for the ease with which they can maintain compliance. Because all code was housed within a single, monolithic application prior to the migration, and because some services within that monolith were financial in nature, the entire application was, in effect, subject to the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) act.

“With a monolith,” Vasan says, “the moment you deploy code to a server, the entire server has to be SOX compliant.”

Because the team migrated the system to Azure microservices, microservices that are financial in nature are now separated from those that aren’t.

“With monoliths, every change is a SOX change, so it has to go through multiple approvals before it can be deployed,” Vasan says.

Using microservices “means leaner, shorter audits because the audits only apply to the SOX components, not the entire platform,” he says.

Of the 29 new microservices, eight require SOX compliance, and 20 don’t.

“We used to have SOX issues. Now we don’t. We’re more compliant and audit-friendly because of moving to Azure,” Vasan says.

SOX requirements also led to performance issues.

“Maintaining SOX compliance requires to adhere strict approval and release process including any backend updates to data as well,” MyOrder software engineer Umesh says.

Building for the future

One of the tenants the team migrated is Microsoft Real Estate and Security (RE&S), which is responsible for the construction of new datacenters and office buildings at Microsoft. RE&S purchase orders can represent hundreds of millions of dollars in costs. Now that those POs go through the modern MyOrder infrastructure, RE&S has reduced costs by $1.75 million per year, thanks to retiring many now unnecessary servers and reduced operational costs.

Next, the team is focusing on moving MyOrder data into a data lake.

“There’s an overall investment in the Microsoft organization around data lakes right now,” Vasan says. “Azure has a data lake offering, of course, and we’re creating this single source of truth that people are using to build insights around POs. If you want to create a purchase order automatically through an API, for example, you can do that now.”

“There is a fantastic opportunity to optimize and incorporate intelligence in the system leveraging machine learning and it has been kicked off with integration of category classification model i.e., software model” MyOrder software engineer Dewraj says.

“Besides there are active conversation and efforts are being made to also leverage ML (machine learning) to optimize the compliance checks for enhancing the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance.”

“Moving away from batch processing to real time APIs to reduce the onboarding time and Purchase Order Turn Around Time. For example, PET (Planning Execution Tracker) and PDS retirement (POE, PCC, and Account Code) data is exposed through real time APIs.”

“v-Payments will help business users to procure small purchases without going through supplier onboarding process and would require minimal approval and validation. The user would have the flexibility to purchase from any AMEX supplier using v-Payment credit cards.”

Those capabilities are a far cry from those of the massive, monolithic legacy system that the reborn MyOrder has replaced.

• Learn more on Microsoft’s modern engineering transformation.
• Discover how Microsoft is embracing a cloud-centric architecture.
• Find out how Microsoft is designing a modern service architecture for the cloud.

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Our digital transformation has been a twofold journey.

First, we upgraded our core processes, providing efficient and effective self-service portals for our employees and powerful tools for our HR team using SAP SuccessFactors. Those processes include the nuts-and-bolts applications associated with human capital management (HCM): the employee portal, rewards, payroll, and other essential HR functions.

With the core processes in place, our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) team had everything they needed to revolutionize the data at the center of HR.

The architecture we chose? Microsoft Azure Data Lake.

[Explore all the ways that AI is driving Microsoft’s digital transformation. Learn how Microsoft is creating the digital workplace.]

Building a modernized HR data estate

When data is scattered across disparate systems, it’s difficult to provide agility, insights, and advanced analytics through AI. In today’s world of big data and predictive intelligence, these capabilities aren’t just a luxury. They drive talent conversations, workforce planning, and an improved employee experience that affects business outcomes.

But when an enterprise’s data is siloed or fragmented, those outcomes are out of reach.

“What happens when you don’t have a modern data architecture?” asks Harsh Raj Singh Thakur, principal software engineering manager on the MDEE HR Data and Insights team. “You have a tedious and drawn-out process before you can retrieve your metrics. It’s a cumbersome task, it’s expensive, it’s not easy to maintain, and there’s a lot of cost to get it all done.”

To make HR insights more accessible and insightful, MDEE first had to assemble a unified and accessible data estate. Our SAP SuccessFactors implementation for core HR processes helped lay the groundwork by streamlining external and operational data to make them more organized and available for processing.

With modern core processes in place, MDEE engineers could turn their attention to data.

The journey to data transformation

Like all large-scale transformations, this one involved a great deal of complexity and multiple touchpoints. Microsoft Azure Data Lake provided the modern analytics platform that would not only enable the team to ingest, store, transform, and analyze the data, but also deliver simpler data discoverability, maintain data security, and ensure compliance.

Unifying the data

Considering the wide array of HR systems at Microsoft, it was important to bring all the data together to give HR an end-to-end view of the employee lifecycle and the moments that matter in an employees’ journey. At the same time, the team took efforts to reduce redundant data copies across the enterprise.

The ease of use from actually having everything collocated in an Azure Data Lake makes it easy to build out connected insights. It’s the foundation of our modernization journey.

—Harsh Raj Singh Thakur, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience HR Data and Insights

“Enabling connected insights which are trusted and secure through a modern data platform in Azure Cloud was a key goal as we set out to drive the digital data transformation in the HR ecosystem,” says Johnson Samuel, principal group engineering manager for MDEE’s HR Data and Insights team.

Multiple systems make up the HR ecosystem: Employee Central for core HR, iCIMS for applicant tracking, listening systems, rewards, CRM, employee learning, and more. While each of these systems serves an important purpose, the potential to unlock insights by unifying all of their data is immense.

“The ease of use from actually having everything collocated in an Azure Data Lake makes it easy to build out connected insights.” Raj Singh Thakur says. “It’s the foundation of our modernization journey.”

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 serves as the common storage layer, which ingests data through Azure Data Factory, messaging systems, and other sources. By properly defining storage structures and models, the team had made the first step toward a more modern data platform.

Expanding the data footprint with new metrics and scorecards

Ever-increasing volumes of data illustrated the need for advanced analytics. They were no longer a choice—they were a necessity.

“There are many lines of businesses within HR, like Global Talent Acquisition, Talent and Learning, and HR Services who manage HR operations,” Samuel says. “We’ve enabled new capabilities for each of these different HR functions.”

Key metrics across the ecosystem include the recruiting funnel, workforce, headcount, employee engagement, learning and development, and other functions across HR. The analytics apparatus uses a combination of Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Analysis Services, and Power BI Shared Datasets, while Microsoft Power BI is responsible for visualization.

This powerful combination of technologies helped build complex analytics and drove consistency across teams. It also unlocked the ability to bring disparate metrics together to help determine correlation and causation between different factors.

Data governance

Next, the team needed to ensure that engineers and end users could access data in the lake safely and securely. Good governance keeps data access compliant because users can only request information that’s relevant to their roles. Driven by the HR Privacy team and enabled by a home-grown security and governance platform, MDEE established column-level security (CLS) on the Data Lake.

“When an HR team requests data, they get access to only the specific data set,” Raj Singh Thakur says. “So if you’re looking for an employee’s name and alias but your role doesn’t require you to know their salary, gender, or other aspects of their identity, you won’t get access.”

This approach makes sure we respect our employees’ privacy and that we comply with local laws that regulate how we use our data. Data governance also includes data discoverability, quality, and lineage functionality, which the team established through Microsoft Purview and in-house solutions to support more complex scenarios.

Modern engineering

MDEE also developed key platform capabilities that ensure high-quality and trustworthy data across the estate and drive engineering efficiency.

Whether the metric is headcount, performance management, employee learning, or any other area, each of them follows the architectural pattern of a Data Lakehouse, a system where all information resides in the Data Lake, without the need to build separate data marts. It allows our engineers to scale storage and compute independently for greater efficiency.

Between telemetry dashboards that help engineers understand system health and continuous optimization across code and infrastructure, this new architecture has helped save significant Azure costs—a reduction of around 50% over 2 years. Meanwhile, enabling agile development and DevOps is helping the team deliver iteratively and realize business value faster.

But the real value lies in the insights that unified, normalized data empowers.

“We’ve normalized the data by leveraging a company-wide taxonomy that we can use across other projects very easily,” says Mithun Manganahalli Goud, principal software engineer on MDEE’s HR Data and Insights team. “So from a data-delivery service standpoint, we can provide information to a wide range of downstream systems and data consumers.”

Building a platform for the future

While the new architecture is actively meeting current reporting needs, MDEE also looked toward the future.

We’ve created a rich content system where we can manage emerging requirements with the current data and metadata, so it’s future-ready. We already have the process in place, so we won’t have to go back and reinvent the wheel.

—Mithun Manganahalli Goud, principal software engineer, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience Data and People Analytics

The platform is capable of enabling deep insights that leverage machine learning. While today’s focus is on descriptive and diagnostic functions, the team is working toward predictive and prescriptive analytics through AI and machine learning.

“We’ve created a rich content system where we can manage emerging requirements with the current data and metadata, so it’s future-ready,” Manganahalli Goud says. “We already have the process in place, so we won’t have to go back and reinvent the wheel.”

When our HR team takes the next step into AI-driven insights, the foundations will already be in place.

Driving human-centered innovation with Microsoft Azure Data Lake

Our modernized data architecture has enhanced the HR teams’ capabilities. Better data immediacy means data pulls that used to take 24 hours now get done in a fraction of the time—around four to six hours. Similarly, the time it takes to enable self-service access for bring-your-own-compute data processing is rapidly falling.

One of the most unique and forward-thinking outcomes is that we’ve been able to combine qualitative with quantitative data. We’re able to create data models with our survey information as well as more quantitative data like attrition and diversity, then combine them in an aggregated, de-identified way to understand broad insights.

—Dawn Klinghoffer, vice president, People Analytics

But the most powerful outcomes are the cross-category, cross-disciplinary insights that unified and accessible data provides for HR leaders.

“One of the most unique and forward-thinking outcomes is that we’ve been able to combine qualitative with quantitative data,” says Dawn Klinghoffer, vice president of People Analytics at Microsoft. “We’re able to create data models with our survey information as well as more quantitative data like attrition and diversity, then combine them in an aggregated, de-identified way to understand broad insights.”

The more people interact with the data, the more it will lead to deeper questions and better insights to drive their business or Microsoft as a whole.

—Patrice Pelland, partner group engineering director, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

For example, by combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we’ve been able to quantify the impact of blocking focus time on employees’ perception of work-life balance.

“Making data available to all people in a self-service, consumable way gives them the opportunity to ask the questions they don’t even know they have,” says Patrice Pelland, partner group engineering director for MDEE. “The more people interact with the data, the more it will lead to deeper questions and better insights to drive their business or Microsoft as a whole.”

Those questions and insights have already led to human-centered improvements and innovations. One example is the wide adoption of team agreements that empower employees to collectively self-determine the work modes that serve them best. HR’s work has even informed some of the “nudge” product features for employee experience tools like Microsoft Viva, for instance, recommending focus blocks to improve productivity and overall work-life balance—a metric that’s currently on the rise across Microsoft.

Ultimately, the more people who have access to high-quality, trustworthy data, the more we can provide a world-class experience for all employees.

“There’s a lot of envisioning based on the services that we’ve been building that people didn’t even think could exist,” Pelland says. “We’re building the foundational layers to offer things that will be truly transformational for the HR business. Whatever size your organization is, and whichever HCM you use, with Azure, you can do what we’re doing right now.”

• The gold standard should be unity between transactional tools and data tools.
• Start from an understanding that it’s about people and ground your work in that.
• Think big but think holistically; start with a goal and work toward it iteratively.
• Consider the experiences that will delight your end users.
• Start from how you’re going to use the data, then work backward.
• Collaborate early and often. Otherwise, preconceived notions can creep in.

• Explore all the ways that AI is driving Microsoft’s digital transformation.
• Learn how Microsoft is creating the digital workplace.

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

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The post Enabling advanced HR analytics and AI with Microsoft Azure Data Lake appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Thanks to its limitations, when a company employee transferred to a new job in a different country or region, it could seem like they were starting over.

“When employees moved country to country within the company, behind the scenes our HR operations teams had to manually move them to a different country code,” says Sruthi Annamaneni, a partner director of software engineering on the Microsoft Digital team deploying the company’s new HR system.

It was a matter of bringing the company’s HR data together in one place.

One of the reasons we’re rebuilding Microsoft’s Human Resources core is so we can unify the experience our employees have with us. We want it to feel like it’s the same Microsoft no matter which country or region someone works in.

—Sruthi Annamaneni, partner director of software engineering, Microsoft Digital

“It was about aggregating and having a single place to master all employee data across 109 countries,” Annamaneni says. “This would enable us to have a single global policy for all of Microsoft and to have all of our country-specific local policies implemented in one place. Reducing and improving error-prone, high-touch manual processes would help us keep our core HR systems running smoothly while improving our ability to support employees across the globe.”

For those reasons, Microsoft Digital—the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company—has been upgrading Microsoft’s core Human Resources systems.

“One of the reasons we’re rebuilding Microsoft’s Human Resources core is so we can unify the experience our employees have with us,” Annamaneni says. “We want it to feel like it’s the same Microsoft no matter which country or region someone works in.”

Microsoft is wrapping up a multiyear effort to move its core Human Resources systems to SAP SuccessFactors. The makeover of Microsoft’s Human Resources core is largely complete with a last handful of external staff and newly acquired employees being upgraded this winter.

When we stood up our instance on Azure, that was a big, big milestone for us and for them. We’re a frontline user of their product in our cloud.

—Kerry Olin, Microsoft corporate vice president of Human Resources Services

“Our legacy system was not scaling to our global requirements and aspirations for a consistent employee experience,” says Kerry Olin, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Human Resources Services. “We needed a more modern, flexible, and capable core HR system.”

Olin says the company reviewed many HR systems—it even considered working with Microsoft Digital to build an in-house system. In the end, the team decided to go with SAP SuccessFactors because it would play a foundational role in Microsoft’s bid to transform its vast array of secondary HR systems; like improving mobility, supporting new acquisitions, or transforming payroll. It also helped that the cloud-based SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite runs on Microsoft Azure. SAP has a longstanding partnership with Microsoft as a preferred cloud provider.

Microsoft is one of first large on-premises enterprises to move its HR systems to Microsoft Azure, a migration that is paving the way for other SAP SuccessFactors customers (and SAP SuccessFactors itself) to transition to the same cloud platform.

“When we stood up our instance on Azure, that was a big, big milestone for us and for them,” Olin says. “We’re a frontline user of their product in our cloud.”

Getting Microsoft’s Human Resources core to nearly-finished status hasn’t been easy—with HR systems in 109 countries and regions, the company’s core system is massive and complex. Until this overhaul, the HR data management approach varied considerably around the world, making it feel like the company had a separate HR system in every country and location. “This project was a great example of how people, process, and technology have to transform together to successfully land a big transformation in any enterprise,” Annamaneni says.

While such complexity challenges force most companies of Microsoft’s size to start over when they upgrade their HR systems, Microsoft rejected that tradition in favor of keeping the lights on as they went about the four-year upgrade.

We didn’t want to disrupt anyone. We didn’t want to have our team or our employees have to learn an entirely new system.

—Rajamma Krishnamurthy, principal program manager, Human Resources Foundational Services team, Microsoft Digital

“This is like completely rebuilding a train while the train is running,” Annamaneni says. “First you change the wheels, then you swap out the engine, and you keep going until everything is new and updated—it’s not easy. There are a zillion things that can go wrong.”

Why not start fresh like everyone else?

Because they wanted to minimize the impact on its 225,000 employees and external partners, and importantly, on the hundreds of HR professionals who work in the system to sustain business continuity on a daily basis.

“We didn’t want to disrupt anyone,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal program manager for the Human Resources Foundational Services team in Microsoft Digital. “We didn’t want to have our team or our employees have to learn an entirely new system.”

First, Microsoft flipped the switch on in Canada, Norway, and Sweden.

“Many things went well, and a lot of things didn’t go well,” Krishnamurthy says. “We learned a lot, and we took what we learned to build a template that we used for the rest of the roll out.”

Next came India, which was the most complex country besides the US.

“The idea was the path to the United States was through India,” she says. “We had our governance ready—we knew where things could go wrong, we knew which stakeholders we would have to help get through it.”

India went well, which opened the door to tackle the US, which began in February 2020.

“The United States was the biggest, scariest for us,” Krishnamurthy says. “We had a lot of people using the system who were not managers—we had a large admin population who used it every day. They had strong needs and desires on how the system should work.”

They used it heavily from Day One.

“We made sure their voices were heard,” she says. “Their work was not disrupted.”

The team commissioned a vendor to build a solution to bulk load employee data changes.  It is also using a Microsoft Power Application solution for access management while it works with a third party to build its own solution.

As for the HR specialists and admins using the new system? When issues flared up, Krishnamurthy and team funneled them into rapid response channels in Microsoft Teams, which allowed them to help each other work through it and gave them a place to share best practices.

“We were able to manage a lot of upheaval through these channels,” Krishnamurthy says. “They were a great change management channel.”

And there was a lot of volume. “We had close to 1,000 people using them to get answers on a daily basis,” she says. “It was awesome to see our community help each other like that.”

One of our biggest goals was to provide business agility. We’ve been able to do that in a way that sets us up well for the future.

—Suresh Kalimuthu, principal software engineering manager, Human Resources Foundational Services team, Microsoft Digital

Interestingly, the channels have turned into such a helpful resource that HR teams demanded that they live on past the system upgrade.

“With COVID, we need to continue that longer than we thought,” Krishnamurthy says. “Our exec admin professional community came together in the Teams support channel for the SAP SuccessFactors launch and continues to depend on and leverage each other for support on a wide range of issues.”

[Learn how Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions. Read about migrating critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure. Discover examining SAP transactions with Azure Anomaly Detector.]

Deploying Microsoft’s Human Resources core

The daunting challenge of deploying Microsoft’s new core HR system fell to Suresh Kalimuthu, a principal software engineering manager on Microsoft Digital’s HR Foundational Services team.

“One of our biggest goals was to provide business agility,” Kalimuthu says. “We’ve been able to do that in a way that sets us up well for the future.”

The technical challenge was tremendous—not only did the company move its HR system to a new platform while also moving to the cloud, it also adopted a new agile engineering method to do all the deployment work.

“We were taking on a lot all at once,” Kalimuthu says. “It has been an interesting, rewarding journey.”

And Krishnamurthy, Kalimuthu’s colleague, says the pressure was on to get it right.

“We have hundreds of stakeholders, finance, benefits, local HR,” Krishnamurthy says. “This is not glamorous. This is the basic running of our company. It takes a lot of effort to bring people along. People needed to understand the value of it.”

One of the big challenges the team had to account for when building the new system was how laws, rules, and systems in each country or region varied.

“We built a system that allows us to make local adjustments that don’t affect the larger system,” Kalimuthu says. “For example, if I want to create a new hire system for Canada, we can make those changes without disrupting anything that we deploy globally.”

Another challenge was the need to build custom solutions where SAP SuccessFactors’ out of the box product stopped short.

“Our HR systems are very complex and matrixed, much more so than most enterprises,” Kalimuthu says. “In several cases, we needed to fill in gaps with our own solutions.”

In those cases, doing so was straightforward. “SAP SuccessFactors has an ability to allow custom integrations and extend their capability,” he says. “We saved big time by leveraging our own technology when we needed it—this gave us a lot of flexibility.”

We solved some of these challenges ourselves, but we did so in partnership with SAP SuccessFactors. They are addressing our concerns—there has been a good give and take, and SAP SuccessFactors and their other customers have benefitted.

—Suresh Kalimuthu, principal software engineering manager, Human Resources Foundational Services team, Microsoft Digital

For example, Microsoft HR wanted to be able to deliver data on hires, promotions, and so on in near real time. “We wanted to make sure the data was readily available within 30 minutes, but it was only available 24 hours later out of the box,” Kalimuthu says. “We built that capability ourselves.”

The Microsoft products the team used include Azure Functions, Azure Keywords, Azure APIs, Azure Storage, Azure Service Bus, Azure Hub, Azure Active Directory, and Azure Encryption.

A big shift was moving all HR data onto one, connected platform. “We realized the value of having one data platform that stretches across all of Microsoft,” Kalimuthu says. “It takes our data from one end point to another.”

The team beefed up other areas as well, including on SOX compliancy, privacy, and security.

“We solved some of these challenges ourselves, but we did so in partnership with SAP SuccessFactors,” Kalimuthu says. “They are addressing our concerns—there has been a good give and take, and SAP SuccessFactors and their other customers have benefitted.”

Now that the team is winding down its upgrade of the core HR system, it is now turning to a future where updates and changes become much easier.

“While we won’t light up all of its new capabilities today or tomorrow, there is functionality in the system which significantly expands and enhances what we can do next,” Olin says. “We have some terrific examples of business value realization from the new core system already—there’s more opportunity ahead.”

Here are some principles you can use to guide you as you consider upgrading your HR core systems:

• Standardize how you will approach the upgrade before you start working through your various HR processes.
• Focus on completeness and data quality from the start.
• Think globally but act locally when it comes to data, privacy, and other requirements.
• Recognize that it takes a village when it comes to a project as large as upgrading your core systems—do everything you can to get the village ready and to keep them informed along the way.
• There will be multiple moving parts—focus on the critical ones and ensure they do not break when you release the product (for example, make triple sure payroll will work the day after launch).
• You will need able and willing partners who both know the product you’re deploying and how to deploy it.
• Do not try to boil the ocean—to be successful you will need to break the project into a series of well thought out steps.

Learn how Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions.

Read about migrating critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.

Discover examining SAP transactions with Azure Anomaly Detector.

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 Upgrading Microsoft’s core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Adopting rigorous design standards is helping Microsoft get better at something very important to the company—getting accessibility right inside its own walls.

Microsoft’s journey to transform its approach to accessibility started when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the helm in 2014, says Tricia Fejfar, partner director of user experience in Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms Microsoft. Nadella sharpened the company’s focus on accessibility in 2017, when he penned a moving essay describing his experience raising a child with cerebral palsy.

“That really got us thinking about accessibility internally,” Fejfar says. “Employees are more productive and engaged when they have simple, easy-to-use tools, and accessibility is a very important part of that DNA.”

More than 1 billion people on the planet identify as having some form of a disability, so building experiences that are accessible to all Microsoft employees makes a difference every day.

“Being able to do my job at Microsoft based on my skills and not be blocked by my blindness has made a big difference in my life,” says Manish Agrawal, a senior program manager for the Accessibility team within Microsoft Digital.

Agrawal, who is blind, works to make Microsoft products more accessible to people with disabilities. It’s about creating an inclusive work environment where everyone can succeed.

“For me, it’s not just about making products accessible for Microsoft employees to help them get their work done,” he says. “It’s also about supporting employees with disabilities and ensuring that Microsoft builds a diverse and inclusive workforce across the spectrum of abilities.”

Fejfar adds, “Designing for and building experiences that reflect the diversity of the people who use them makes sure we put our people at the center of our work. Until people recognize that, and honor it in the work they do, they can’t begin to make sure what they build will take care of everyone’s needs.”

It’s about understanding why you build something and who will use it. Microsoft calls it being human-centric and customer obsessed.

“Building accessible experiences is not a compliance effort or a checklist of guidelines,” Fejfar says. “It’s about thinking of the user at all stages of the development process so you build usable, delightful, and cohesive end-to-end experiences.”

Hiring and supporting people with disabilities makes good sense for the company and helps attract top talent.

“Millennials choose employers who reflect their values, and diversity and inclusion are at the top of their list,” Fejfar says. “They make up 75 percent of the global workforce.”

Making a difference in the lives of people like Agrawal is what brings people to the Accessibility team, Fejfar says. “We’re here because we want to make sure the internal products that our employees use every day are accessible,” she says.

[Find out how building inclusive, accessible experiences at Microsoft is a catalyst for digital transformation. Learn how Microsoft enables remote work for its employees.]

Adopting a coherent design system

Nadella sharing his story led to a company-wide pivot toward accessibility and improving employability for people with disabilities at Microsoft. One of the initiatives connected to this goal was creating a set of coherence design standards that teams can use each time they builds new tools and services for employees.

“Using a coherent design language reduces engineering costs while increasing engineering efficiency,” Fejfar says. “That makes what we build predictable to our users, which increases engagement and builds trust.”

Microsoft Digital’s design system is built on top of Fluent, Microsoft’s externally facing design language, which makes it feel more like Microsoft.

“Building coherently means something very specific to us,” Fejfar says. “It means designing and coding accessible and reusable UI components, interaction patterns, brand, and other guidelines to build predictable experiences for our employees.”

These design standards have allowed Microsoft to not only consider accessibility as part of every internal project. They also consider accessibility at every step along the way, from idea, to construction, to release. That makes its products accessible to as wide a range of people as possible, which creates new opportunities and better experiences for everyone who works at Microsoft.

Accessible design benefits everyone

Agrawal cites closed captioning as an example of a widely useful accessibility tool that is now used for far more than helping people with hearing impairments watch TV or follow a presentation. Creative uses of the capability include helping audiences understand someone with a heavy accent, following along on TVs placed in loud environments like airports and bars, or allowing someone to watch TV while their partner sleeps.

In fact, closed captions or subtitles are so popular with the general population that game maker Ubisoft reported that more than 95 percent of the people who play their popular Assassin’s Creed Odyssey game keep subtitles turned on. “When you build for accessibility, you end up building a much more compelling product,” Agrawal says.

Moreover, it’s simply good business sense to ensure that talented people such as Agrawal are empowered to make a significant contribution to companies such as Microsoft.

“We need to make sure all the applications and experiences that we build empower everyone who works here to not only do their work, but to have full, rich experiences while they’re at work,” Fejfar says. “Without accessible tools, people can’t do their best work, and if people can’t do their best work, our company, our culture, and our customers are directly impacted.”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhN1tnBcYLo, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Designing new employee experiences

One telling example of Microsoft Digital’s coherent design approach to accessibility is Microsoft MyHub, a new one-stop shop for employees to get their “at work” stuff done at work, like getting worksite access, taking time off, checking stock rewards, and finding out what holidays are upcoming.

It was also vital to make sure the app experience would be fully accessible, says Bing Zhu, principal design manager in Microsoft Digital’s Studio UX team.

“Before we built the app, our employees had to deal with as many as five to eight different tools almost every day,” Zhu says. “Each experience was different than the last one, and not all of them were as accessible as we needed them to be.”

This fragmented experience was difficult for everyone to navigate and very hard to keep accessible for people with disabilities.

“We used our coherent design system to build a unified, consistent, and accessible experience for our employees,” Zhu says. “Using that as our guide, we were able to design an application that all Microsoft employees can use.”

Not only is Microsoft MyHub compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but it also received a strong usability grade by employees with a spectrum of vision disabilities.

Crucially, the new app was built with accessibility in mind at every stage of its development cycle, Agrawal says.

“We reviewed the design for every feature for accessibility and beta tested the app’s accessibility every time a new feature was implemented,” he says. “We made sure it was accessible for all of our users at each step in the development process.”

One example of how the team that built Microsoft MyHub was guided by Microsoft Digital’s coherence design system was in how it made every interaction and visual element accessible.

“Our coherence design system—which is an extension of Microsoft’s Fluent design system—alongside the accessibility guidance that we provide, helped the MyHub team start incorporating accessibility into their app from the get-go,” says Anna Zaremba, a senior designer on Microsoft Digital’s Coherence team. “Our coherence design system provides components with built-in accessibility that Microsoft Digital’s product teams, like the team that built MyHub, use to create their experiences.”

Work that makes a difference

It’s striking to hear employees in Microsoft Digital talk about the deep satisfaction they take from making products more accessible.

“The greatest reward is hearing from people who have benefitted from our work,” Zaremba says. “I really like the fact that we are doing work that helps the entire company and drives a greater awareness of accessibility.”

Though Microsoft is among the companies pushing hard to build accessibility into everything it does, there is still much work to do. One in 10 people who identify as having some form of disability don’t have the assistive technology they need to fully participate in work and society.

Going forward, Microsoft Digital will continue designing with accessibility as a top priority, using the developmental model it uses to build solutions like Microsoft MyHub as a template for creating the company’s next generation of employee tools.

“We’re still learning this process ourselves,” Zhu says. “We’re figuring out how to make accessibility and design work with program managers and engineers to create even more opportunities for access. It’s an exciting challenge.”

And one that will open doors for Microsoft employees—and others.

“I really love building software anyway,” Agrawal says. “But it’s great to be part of a team that is working to make Microsoft a more inclusive place to work. It has a real impact on people’s lives.”

• Learn more about creating an accessibility training program for your team.
• Dive into the latest accessibility fundamentals training course on Microsoft Learn.
• October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month 2020—learn more about the 75th anniversary of this event in the US here.
• Read how Microsoft is sharing how many of its employees identify as having some form of disability.
• Read how people with disabilities shape technology people use every day.
• Find out how building inclusive, accessible experiences at Microsoft is a catalyst for digital transformation.
• Learn how Microsoft enables remote work for its employees.

The post Microsoft’s fresh approach to accessibility powered by inclusive design appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The grassroots program—which is now more than 10 years old—has been so successful that the people who manage it had to rebuild the infrastructure they use to operate it from the ground up. The program was bumping its proverbial head and needed to scale.

Thankfully, they wouldn’t have to go far to get what they needed; the solution could be built upon Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft’s Technology Education and Learning Support (TEALS) program helps prepare high schoolers for careers in computer science.

We’ve finally got the scale that we’ve been looking for. Technology is no longer a limiting factor for us.

—Ganesh Shankaran, principal software engineering lead, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

“The growth of our program has gone far beyond what we could have ever imagined,” says Ganesh Shankaran, a principal software engineering lead with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company. “It got so popular that we couldn’t keep up.”

In response Microsoft recently revamped TEALS’ Operational Platform, known as TOP for short. Built on Microsoft Azure, the new TOP allows regional managers of TEALS to incorporate many more schools, which will allow the company to get many more Microsoft and other software engineer volunteers into classrooms.

“We’ve finally got the scale that we’ve been looking for,” Shankaran says. “Technology is no longer a limiting factor for us.”

With the improvements to TOP, Microsoft can now achieve its philanthropic goals, opening doors to careers in technology for students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields from all over the United States and British Columbia.

[Learn more about microservices architecture design. Explore the TEALS site to be inspired or get involved. Design your own microservices architecture.]

The need for TEALS

Since the nascent stages of the Information Age, there has been a deficit in computer science professionals. Plenty of colleges offer the right degrees, but there’s a scarcity of pre-college computer science education.

In the USA, there are even state laws mandating that every student needs to take a computer science class to graduate, yet there are few resources in place to ensure that teachers can successfully deliver the instruction. Microsoft’s TEALS program strives to address this ever-growing need.

—Emily Fishkind, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Qualified experts who could teach high school computer science courses usually opt for higher paying jobs. Especially in rural areas and in schools where students are predominantly Black and African American, finding adequate computer science educators is a major obstacle.

There are efforts across the United States to turn the tide, and we’re happy to be a part of that effort here at Microsoft.

“In the USA, there are even state laws mandating that every student needs to take a computer science class to graduate, yet there are few resources in place to ensure that teachers can successfully deliver the instruction,” says Emily Fishkind, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “Microsoft’s TEALS program strives to address this ever-growing need.”

Eleven years ago, the Microsoft Philanthropies team at Microsoft adopted TEALS, a potent, tiny project piloted in a single school. The dream was to help bring computer science education to as many high schools as possible. However, the tool to manage such a prodigious expansion didn’t exist.

Building scalability on Microsoft Azure

Kip Fern, now a senior program manager lead in the Microsoft Philanthropies Operations team, was one of the original TEALS classroom volunteers. He got tapped with driving the design of TOP, a highly customized solution built on Microsoft Azure for regional managers to run TEALS. Over the next few years, new features and improvements would continue to be implemented by the team itself.

“The program would change and add new requirements, which made us add new features on a continuous basis,” Fern says.

But there came a point at which modification wouldn’t suffice—the program was growing too fast, and TOP needed to be reinvented.

“This growth paired with our inability to scale within our legacy system, posed significant risk to the overall efficiency of our regional managers’ day-to-day operations,” Fishkind says. “Shifting to the new architecture not only addresses compliance issues, but it also helps our primary customers—the folks who make the TEALS program run—more efficient.”

Three years ago, Microsoft leadership called to extend the reach of TEALS to over 600 new school focused on African American students, but, for multiple reasons, legacy TOP couldn’t support the directive.

TOP was about to be outdated and out of support; it had more than 500 bugs, and accessibility improvements were needed. Furthermore, it couldn’t perform well with all the data it was handling.

“The TOP legacy system was at risk of breaking down, posing significant risk to the program’s operations along with system security, reliability, and availability,” Fishkind says.

Importantly, it couldn’t scale.

The original TOP that had enabled the program’s early development was now holding it back from further growth and impact.

Architecting TOP vNext

The latest version, called TOP vNext, was designed with microservices architecture, a style in which each service is separated based on its need. With this structure, MDEE is building scalability on Microsoft Azure for each service independently. The admin service, the school service, and the volunteer service, as examples, are deployed on cloud and have their own backend database within Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Within a fraction of a millisecond, they can scale to multiple regions and maintain 100 percent availability.

The adoption of microservices architecture in TOP vNext protects TEALS from the risk of total system breakdown, offering a more resilient and stable system. Shankaran describes legacy TOP as an outdated system posing security risks by comparison.

“The traditional monolithic architecture, where a single malfunction could cause a complete system failure, has become obsolete,” Shankaran says. “With microservices, TEALS is now immune to total system breakdowns as each component operates independently and can continue functioning even if one component experiences issues. This independence not only increases system reliability but also facilitates efficient testing and maintenance processes.”

With its robust utilization of Microsoft Azure Service Bus and other cutting-edge internal message handlers, TOP vNext creates an impermeable bridge between the system and external platforms like WordPress TEALSK12. This convenient and intuitive application serves as the central hub for regional managers, empowering them to effortlessly monitor, update, and access critical information in real-time, all through a seamless exchange of data facilitated by seamless message communication across all systems.

It is absolutely better; it is faster; it is more resilient. It has a cleaner user interface now.

—Kip Fern, senior program manager lead, Operations, Microsoft Philanthropies

The sheer size of the TEALS data set requires optimal performance when loading on the grid. TOP vNext meets this demand by leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search, which delivers lightning-fast API response times in under a millisecond. This ensures seamless and efficient access to the vast amounts of data at the heart of the TEALS system.

With Microsoft Azure DevOps, they also achieved zero-touch deployment for these resources, including Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, IT, app services, and all the microservices.

Benefits of the new TOP

Everything about the new program is better.

“It is absolutely better; it is faster; it is more resilient,” Fern says. “It has a cleaner user interface now.”

Scalability for TEALS is more possible than ever. With improved UI, performance, and efficiency, TOP vNext gives regional managers more time to incorporate new schools and enhance curricula, and the new TOP can handle the increase in data.

“It’s blazing fast,” Shankaran says.

The substantial and ever-increasing data doesn’t bog down the speed of the tool. Now that TOP is faster and has better UI, regional managers can spend less time on tooling, and the time savings translates to more students benefiting from the program.

Today, TEALS has a steady state of over 500 schools with 1,500 volunteers every single year. There are around 40 regional managers around the United States supporting between 15 to 30 schools apiece including the classroom teachers, school principals, volunteers, and summer training for the volunteers.

“If a regional manager can do one more school, that means on average we’ll impact 2,425 more students each year,” Fern says.

TOP is engineered to meet our scaling needs. It’s now a high performing system that simplifies our regional manager experience.

—Ganesh Shankaran, principal software engineering lead, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

As TOP vNext can handle more data, regional managers can now support as many schools as they want.

Over time, MDEE and TEALS will be able to add new features to TOP in harmony with the feedback received from stakeholders. There’s an ever-flowing possibility for iteration with the new TOP platform, which includes a feedback mechanism between TEALS volunteers, regional managers, and stakeholders.

“TOP is engineered to meet our scaling needs,” Shankaran says. “It’s now a high performing system that simplifies our regional manager experience.”

It’s a great example of what you can do with Microsoft Azure, he says. “Its cognitive capability is playing a big part in bringing these experiences alive,” he says.

Here are biggest takeaways from retooling our program to get our software engineers in high school classrooms across the United States and in British Columbia:

• Legacy programs often fail to keep up with program needs, especially as new features and capacities are added. Moving to the cloud empowers you to scale efforts while also giving your solution extensibility.
• Microservices architecture is a prevalent style for building applications that are independently deployable, immensely scalable, and easy to test and modify.
• Including users in your feedback loop is the only way to ensure a solution is empowering productivity and creating impact.
• Feature parity takes time, but if you’ve identified core capabilities, it’s possible to roll out a new solution without creating a lot of disruption.

• Learn more about microservices architecture design.
• Explore the TEALS site to be inspired or get involved.
• Design your own microservices architecture.

The post Turning to Microsoft Azure to put software engineers in high school classrooms appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“The cool stuff, the end user stuff, you can get it in one space, but it’s a lot harder to evolve and build it out at scale,” says Kyle Getty, a senior developer with Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company. “You need a smart platform, a way to do more, faster, and easier, to replicate those experiences in 600 buildings.”

What’s the bare-bones minimum way to connect to Azure Digital Twins? We want to simplify and consolidate declaratively in the build, then let the different teams handle the deployment.

—Kyle Getty, senior developer, Microsoft Digital

To get to these smart building scenarios, Microsoft Digital needs to bring several pieces together. That’s where CI/CD comes in. CI/CD utilizes pipelines—automated processes and tools for build and release steps—which enables teams to build services and packages with greater speed and efficiency.

When used with templates, which combine the content of multiple files into a single pipeline, CI/CD can quickly support incremental changes to deliverables without introducing errors.

[Discover how Microsoft is creating the digital workplace. Learn how Microsoft uses Azure Digital Twins and IoT to modernize its buildings.]

A better way to deliver experiences at scale

Microsoft Azure Digital Twins, which serves as a virtual model of a physical space or object, is pivotal to Microsoft’s strategy for engineering real-world experiences. When a new model or change comes in, the faster it’s available, the faster an experience can be built.

“What’s the bare-bones minimum way to connect to Azure Digital Twins?” Getty says. “We want to simplify and consolidate declaratively in the build, then let the different teams handle the deployment.”

By using CI/CD for Microsoft Azure Digital Twins, Microsoft Digital reduces the number of repetitive and manual tasks required to build and deploy features. Not only does this structured approach accelerate iterative deployment, it introduces extensibility, allowing the organization to create new ways of interacting with smart building features.

This saves Microsoft significant time and avoids a few key obstacles.

“A lot of teams are trying to go from monolith to microservices,” says Michael Bir, a senior software engineer with Microsoft Digital, speaking of the architectural shift from a large system to several smaller ones to improve scalability and developer productivity. “These modular setups create a lot of repositories that comprise the whole application. That also introduces repetition across the repositories.”

While necessary for extensibility and scalability, using linked microservices can be challenging to manage.

Developers often copy existing configurations to tie into these libraries and repositories, regularly taking the last release and mining it for relevant settings before getting to work on the new release. In addition to being tedious, this process can result in subtle changes that might introduce incompatibilities over time.

Using Microsoft Azure DevOps allows Microsoft Digital to merge pipelines (a series of steps needed for delivery) into templates for rapid development, with all the tedious foundational code and testing requirements already in place.

This is core to CI/CD for Microsoft Azure Digital Twins. Once in the hands of developers, these templates can evolve into new projects. Commonalities can be used to build out core services, packages, and downstream microservices needed for Microsoft Azure Digital Twins experiences.

Iterative by nature

CI/CD does more than enable rapid development.

“Our templates allow you to have a global model or to use ring deployments,” Bir says. “We don’t need separate templates to maintain an iterative development environment.”

With CI/CD for Microsoft Azure Digital Twins, developers can work on features independently, testing and deploying them in stages to introduce gradual improvements.

Microsoft Digital can deploy directly into a testing ring where the package or service is automatically inspected for bugs before being elevated into the next ring, a production environment. This ensures a level of quality and consistency across every deployment, but also removes manual testing from the equation. Now, developers can quickly and easily check that a deployment is fully integrated with models before being released.

It also allows the templates to be used in specific environments, like development and production regions where smart buildings might have different needs or requirements, all while enabling extensibility.

With so many different repositories, testing for incompatibilities can become difficult. Fortunately, the team’s structured approach addressed that. By utilizing a single project, or common pipeline, Microsoft Digital can maintain templates for common CI/CD scenarios used by all repositories.

“The common pipeline uses itself to run tests,” Bir says. “We then use Azure DevOps to tag that for iterative deployment by consuming repositories.”

To maintain a healthy and productive iterative development environment, Microsoft Digital auto-deploys to a testing environment. As the test is defined, it establishes requirements to move and elevate the build into production. This gate prevents incompatibilities from reaching a smart building experience.

We had some templates for static code analysis, but we took it to the next level. Before this, we would have to go back to a previous repository that we thought was good, copy and paste it, change the variables for it to make sense, and then tweak some optional things. Now it’s all handled by the template. It’s very flexible.

—Michael Bir, senior software engineer, Microsoft Digital

The iterative agility of CI/CD means that if Microsoft Digital does need to introduce a change, say to adjust for compliance, the organization can orchestrate everything from Microsoft Azure DevOps and then push it out to all repositories. The next time a project deploys, it grabs the updated template.

In centralizing the way projects are updated and published, Microsoft Digital no longer needs to retest and rebuild features for different repositories.

A smart way to build experiences

Teams across Microsoft can now deploy stable and extensible Microsoft Azure Digital Twins experiences at scale.

“We had some templates for static code analysis, but we took it to the next level,” Bir says. “Before this, we would have to go back to a previous repository that we thought was good, copy and paste it, change the variables for it to make sense, and then tweak some optional things. Now it’s all handled by the template. It’s very flexible.”

The structured approach also makes it easy to add members to the team. Instead of pointing users to old releases, the team only has to share the template. It’s already the latest version, and the new user only has to plug in a few variables.

CI/CD for Microsoft Azure Digital Twins has simplified the way Microsoft Digital can approach a build, eliminating lengthy coding and testing tasks while empowering extensible solutions to flourish at scale. Common pipelines and templates can be used to manage and accelerate the features needed to supercharge Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and the models needed to power smart building experiences.

Microsoft Digital will continue to find ways to add value, giving developers certain resources and permissions to test, similar to how Microsoft Azure uses Azure Resource Management templates. As more common pipelines are built into the template, developers will be able to do more faster, without having to take on additional management responsibilities.

“I want a smart building UI,” Getty says. “I don’t want to worry about building code and running tests or which instance to talk to. I want to run code efficiently for how an Azure Digital Twins model has been set up. Now we have something to tie it all together and pass on that value so others can focus on what they need to.”

• Simplify. You don’t need to engage with every lever available; leave enough options available to stay agile.
• If you decide to use CI/CD, version correctly. All pipelines referencing a main branch will be affected by changes, but tags allow developers to share changes and bring them in as needed.
• Microsoft Azure DevOps and YAML enable Microsoft Digital to deploy smart building experiences at scale by simplifying and reusing common pipelines.
• Always leave something extensible. Open parameters to run testing or change a component. Leaving flexibility via parameters gives you as many options as possible.
• Going all-in on CI/CD means that some unique things won’t fit. If you’re open, orchestration becomes extensible. When you have an outlier, adopt the pattern first; this new functionality can be given to other repositories by default.

• Learn how multi-stage pipelines and YAML are used for continuous delivery in Microsoft Azure DevOps.
• Discover the different Microsoft Azure DevOps template types and their usage.
• Gain insights into how Microsoft Azure DevOps enforces security through templates.
• Discover how Microsoft is creating the digital workplace.
• Learn how Microsoft uses Azure Digital Twins and IoT to modernize Microsoft buildings.

The post How Microsoft is delivering smart building experiences with CI/CD for Azure Digital Twins appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Just ask James Gagnon.

He’ll tell you that good engineering teams at Microsoft and in Microsoft Digital are driving towards using DevOps to do their work, and with good reason.

“DevOps is a foundational part of actually achieving digital transformation, of becoming truly agile,” says Gagnon, a software engineering lead on the Microsoft Digital team delivering finance applications inside Microsoft.

Moving to DevOps can be as simple as combining software engineering and support roles, then delivering smaller software increments. That seems easy enough, but here at Microsoft, Gagnon and others driving this kind of transformation often find that organizational boundaries, team culture, and business processes must also evolve to get people to buy into this modern approach to engineering.

Gagnon has seen this story play out over the last six years.

“There is no doubt that implementing DevOps will increase the speed and quality of software delivery, but it will cost you everything if done in isolation,” Gagnon says.

Leaders must burn old practices

“DevOps thrives with increased autonomy,” Gagnon says. “Empowering teams to measure, deliver, fail, learn, and improve internally will yield greater outcomes. Leaders that measure outcomes over execution governance will give their teams the freedom to innovate while taking greater accountability of their work.”

Gagnon says that team productivity measures and processes such as sprint burndowns, velocity, work in progress limits, and story pointing must be private to the sprint team. He says leaders should enable these basic practices and ensure they are in place, but they should also make sure the data stays with the team.

“This creates a safe environment to reflect and enables continuous improvement,” he says. “Leaders that create aggregate reports and force specific practices will create a culture of gamification. Reports and scorecards will become more important to the engineers than the outcomes and the customers.”

Leaders who control and over-centralize solutions will frustrate engineering teams and impact their ability to deliver working software with agility, Gagnon says.

“DevOps transformation starts with software transformation and culture transformation,” he says.  “The sprint team knows best the debt that is impacting the team and is best suited to partner with business and leadership to define the roadmap.”

Delivery of schedule driven projects is a legacy success metric of the waterfall software delivery lifecycle. Gagnon has been part of this and learned the hard way that it doesn’t work.

“I’ve seen the perfect software engineering storm and it was a long nasty ride,” he says. “Leadership had set a date for achieving transformation. The engineering team changed structurally with new undocumented expectations. Engineers had to modernize monolithic legacy software, originally built on a tight budget, all while success was measured by new business feature delivery and quality. Unfortunately, leadership was the first and only thing to change.”

How it works—the UAT example

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is one of the areas causing excessive toil when moving to an agile or modern engineering culture, Gagnon says. Many times, these legacy software engineering practices have been part of the release process for years and compliance validation or other factors required the business stakeholder to review and approve changes. When left in place, this conflicts with the goals of DevOps in general.

“The UAT process alone has huge implications in our ability to move towards DevOps, it’s simply not compatible. Engineering of the current feature sprint can’t stop while UAT happens for the previous feature sprint,” he says. “This is supposed to be faster, right?”

The changes required to move away from UAT need to happen both in engineering teams and the business teams.

“Engineers must take full accountability for quality and business stakeholders must be integral to the process,” Gagnon says. “Achieving the agreed upon success criteria defined at the beginning of a sprint must be demonstrated by a simple sprint review as part of closing the sprint.”

Not only does a UAT process slow down agile methodology, it creates code line management complexity, he says. This requires a separate integration step, an additional branch, and slows down development with increased cost.

“Modern engineering can’t be achieved when managing branches that map to legacy process,” Gagnon says. “We must deliver to production what was engineered within the same sprint.”

People make it happen

Just as culture needs to transform, the software engineers who make up that culture do as well. At Microsoft it started by combining the development and testing role, and now the company is merging the service engineering role into this DevOps role as well.

“The goal is to drive end to end accountability into the software engineering discipline,” Gagnon says. “This is crucial to the service view and achieving modern engineering practices.”

It’s a transition that’s harder than it looks.

“This isn’t simply a matter of learning a few new technical skills, but, also soft skills,” he says. “Writing code is just one expectation.”

Engineers need to work closely with business partners, manage more aspects of a project, and collaborate with other team members.

“I’d love to hire the mythical unicorn, someone who understands quality, who understands security, who can code, and who can communicate with others,” Gagnon says. “These candidates are far and few between. I hire for the basics across all required areas and seek diversity across the team for specialization. This approach has helped balance the team where everyone can contribute within the DevOps model.”

Putting it all together

Gagnon says proper implementation of DevOps has required multiple adaptations to culture and processes at all levels in Microsoft.

“It’s helping to drive our transformation,” he says. “It’s not only moving the organization forward, but the people as well. It’s driving a shift to centralize on outcomes over solutions, which enables DevOps engineers to truly own and take pride in their work.”

It’s the kind of thing that fires you up, and sends old, outdated practices up in smoke.

“I’ve never been more excited about what’s possible at Microsoft than right now,” Gagnon says “The transformation is occurring throughout leadership, which is making it easier for our engineering teams to realize their goals and have fun while doing it.”

• Explore how deploying Kanban at Microsoft leads to engineering excellence.
• Discover how rotating DevOps role improves engineering service quality.
• Unpack how DevOps development model makes Microsoft more nimble, productive.

The post DevOps is sending engineering practices up in smoke appeared first on Inside Track Blog.