That’s exactly what we designed Microsoft Viva Engage to do.

To capture those benefits, we rolled out Microsoft Viva Engage’s newest features to our hundreds of thousands of employees here at Microsoft. Making this happen required a cross-disciplinary team of product specialists, change management practitioners, communicators, and executive sponsors.

We’re creating an environment where deep, meaningful human connection is ambient. If we solve for that, we won’t have this perceived dichotomy between flexible or hybrid work and employees who feel connected.

—Chris Owen, Microsoft Viva program manager, Human Resources

[Learn about all the ways Microsoft Viva is making work life better at Microsoft. See how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday. Find out about Microsoft’s employee-centric experience.]

Keeping connected in the modern work world

Microsoft Viva Engage is the next evolution of our enterprise social platform Yammer, giving our employees a place to connect, express themselves, and find belonging that builds meaningful relationships at work. We’re using it to transform the way we do corporate communications. And while Viva Engage helps all employees connect, its latest features unlock especially powerful ways for our senior leaders to connect with people across their organizations and people with each other across organizations and networks.

We wanted to make sure we were telling the right story and reaching the right people. So we started thinking about how we could best help leaders understand how Viva Engage could make their jobs easier.

—Melissa Cafiero, communications and readiness lead, Microsoft Digital

“We’re creating an environment where deep, meaningful human connection is ambient,” says Chris Owen, Microsoft Viva program manager with Microsoft Human Resources. “If we solve for that, we won’t have this perceived dichotomy between flexible or hybrid work and employees who feel connected.”

We started using Microsoft Viva in helpful new ways starting in in Fall 2022:

• Leadership Corner is a dedicated space for communications and connecting with leaders.
• AMA (Ask Me Anything) events give leaders and employees the chance to make direct connections through Q&As with their colleagues.
• Employee Resource Group brings together employees who can support each other, share ideas, and build community.
• Storyline announcements deliver messaging directly to a leader’s most appropriate audience.
• Social campaigns rally people around shared initiatives through common social media behaviors.
• Analytics demonstrate value and guide behaviors through testing and learning.
• Answers, the latest feature, provides a crowdsourcing forum where employees can get their questions answered.

These features perfectly position Microsoft Viva Engage for a leadership-driven approach to adoption.

Building a strategy for success

The adoption team’s first challenge was finding a way to earn buy-in from our senior leaders. Microsoft Viva Engage is an enterprise social app, and executives are our biggest influencers.

“We wanted to make sure we were telling the right story and reaching the right people,” says Melissa Cafiero, communications and readiness lead in our Microsoft Digital (MSD) organization. “So, we started thinking about how we could best help leaders understand how Viva Engage could make their jobs easier.”

Cafiero’s team partnered with a wide range of collaborators across HR, change management, and product to build a strategy for reaching the executive community.

“We started digging into the size of this audience and the breadth of communication roles at Microsoft,” Cafiero says.

One group stood out: Global Employee and Executive Communications, a team known as GEEC. These professionals work with executives to craft internal communications, so they’re perfectly positioned to influence the influencers.

The adoption team started recruiting GEEC members into a new Early Adopter Program (EAP) for Microsoft Viva Engage. The program had three requirements:

• Become a superuser – Members were encouraged to set aside 30 minutes per week to learn about Microsoft Viva Engage.
• Collect insightful feedback – We asked them to share their insights with the adoption team to help us shape the features and direction of Viva Engage.
• Generate best-use scenarios – We encouraged them to actively use Viva Engage to find ways to promote adoption.

They also had the opportunity to join regular workshops, pop-up focus groups, a bespoke Microsoft Viva community within the app, and 1:1 follow-ups. As a result of this high-touch engagement, they had the comfort and confidence to use the tool in their everyday work and explain its value to executives.

“We started to see what they needed as corporate communicators to best leverage Viva Engage,” Owen says. “An important learning was that we shouldn’t be feature-focused but problem-focused. We asked what challenges these communicators face and began to co-create solutions for how they can best use this app to solve them.”

Viva Engage lets employees see you as someone approachable, someone who cares about them, and by using these features, you can build a culture of involvement that you couldn’t before.

—Paula Bohn, senior business program manager, change and adoption, MSD

Thanks to the adoption team’s work, we had buy-in from key members within the corporate communications discipline. They grew into an engaged group of superusers who were excited to apply Microsoft Viva Engage to their work with executives.

Building groundswell for Microsoft Viva Engage

With the release of leadership-focused features, we were in an excellent position to capture executive buy-in for the rollout.

“We talked to leaders about how employees often see executives as these unreachable entities,” says Paula Bohn, senior business program manager for change and adoption with MSD. “Viva Engage lets employees see you as someone approachable who cares about them, and by using these features, you can build a culture of involvement that you couldn’t before.”

Supported by the communications professionals in the EAP program, our leaders came to the table with a full understanding of Microsoft Viva Engage’s value and how it works. As a result, we had strong buy-in from our internal influencers.

One of the most successful activations came at the end of 2022, when we launched a Microsoft Viva Engage social campaign asking employees to look back over the last year: #2022Reflections. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella contributed his own reflection, it received over 200,000 impressions. That gave the adoption a massive boost.

“My change management team can jump through plenty of hoops to make adoption readiness happen, but a tool doesn’t actually land until employees see their leaders modeling the behavior,” Bohn says.

Microsoft Viva Engage shines through top-down deployment driven by senior leadership. But as it reached a critical mass of usage and engagement, the team took steps to reinforce adoption for all employees.

“Once we began to see leaders posting to their organizations in ways that weren’t possible before, the number of questions and requests for enablement quickly exceeded our capacity for white-glove treatment,” says Frank Delia, senior program manager for Office 365 services management and adoption with MSD. “That’s when we realized we needed to scale this information to meet demand.”

It’s not just about enabling leaders—everyone can take advantage of Microsoft Viva Engage’s capabilities. The best way to fuel Viva Engage usage is to drive interest in solving challenges that teams have and not on trying to get them to deploy a particular feature.

Company-wide adoption efforts included an extensive communication strategy featuring product documentation, in-tool directional supports, internal blogs, and all-employee emails, all while sourcing feedback from GEEC members and employees alike.

Paired with the excitement and engagement of connecting more closely with our top leaders, the groundswell of Microsoft Viva Engage usage continues to surge. As of March 2023, monthly active usage (MAU) for the Viva Engage app in Microsoft Teams stood at 71 percent of Microsoft employees. That’s nearly double its 38 percent MAU before we launched the new features in November, and much higher than our adoption target of 50 percent.

A roadmap for adoption success

At this point, Microsoft Viva Engage usage is high, and the feature sets are fully in place. The next steps are all about scale.

Now that this adoption is firmly established, Microsoft employees’ experience and feedback provide valuable insights for future deployments. Both the approach to communications and the EAP will feature heavily in our next big rollout.

“To me, adoption means users fully understand the product and its value, and they wouldn’t want to do without it.” Bohn says. “That’s the real measure of a successful adoption.”

The specific technology and key players may be different, but the core adoption process will remain our north star. It’s all about communicating value, capturing your key players, and making sure your technology meets your customers’ needs.

• Different approaches are valid for different tools, so select a top-down or bottom-up approach based on your use case.
• Be problem-focused—not feature-focused—to capture value for your key stakeholders.
• Be diligent about building a usage framework and differentiating use cases.
• Identify who your influencers are and who’s influencing them.
• Thoroughly research your target roles and their work.
• Train your early adopters and influencers extensively because other employees will follow their lead.

• Learn about all the ways Viva is making work life better at Microsoft.
• See how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday.
• Find out how Microsoft is building an employee-centric experience.

The post Transforming employee engagement at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Engage appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

Doing the research

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

These surveys covered a lot of ground, including:

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

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

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

Taking business etiquette to virtual spaces

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

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

Avatar etiquette

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

Understand how avatars currently work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will you be presenting?

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

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

When in doubt, ask!

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

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

When is it okay to bust a move?

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

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

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

Representation matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborating beyond the grid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Sara Bush, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

It’s creating a new way to communicate.

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

Impressive spatial audio

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

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

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

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

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

Flexible, inclusive, effective

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Sara Bush, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

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

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

Internal feedback shapes product design

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Laura Oxford, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

One beta tester of immersive spaces was skeptical at first.

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

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

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

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

—Rachel Castillote, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Next steps for next-level engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Magical and special’

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

Castillote is excited about the possibilities still to come.

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

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

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

Her advice?

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

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

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

Find the version for you

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

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

Access immersive spaces

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

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

Explore and socialize

Within the three-dimensional environment, you can:

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

Customize your avatar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Office printing is also a potential network security risk. Between the infrastructure of the Internet of Things and the number of users needing access to these devices, the threat surface is huge. Historically we’ve relied on print servers, virtual private networks (VPNs), and printer drivers to manage users’ access to printing.

But of course, we also know the best modern software technology exists in the cloud. It affords the most security as well as the most savings. Something wasn’t adding up.

A few years ago, we at Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE)—the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company—realized that printing, one of the most common tasks that nearly all employees do, was one of the last operations that we had not yet brought to the cloud. It became our vision to change that and bring modern security and seamless access to printers to all employees, in all our offices, across the globe.

“Everyone needs to print something at some time,” says Pete Apple, principal architect and technical program manager in the infrastructure engineering services team within MDEE. “It’s one of those universal things about working in a business. As we upgraded the protocols with nearly everything else in our network, printing remained one of the only things done ‘the old way.’ We realized that this was a common area that needed addressing.”

The path to creating Universal Print, Microsoft’s solution to the needs of modern enterprise cloud printing, has evolved over several years as technology has changed. We’ve trialed, improved, and scaled our solution with the insights gained from utilizing this solution with our own employees.

And we are on the cusp of our next breakthrough in technology and security: eliminating the need for VPNs for office printing.

[Read our earlier blog post on Universal Print where we walk through our early steps to rethink our approach to printing here at Microsoft. Learn how we’re Microsoft’s ‘Customer Zero.’ Learn how we’re doing more with less internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure. Learn more about the foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork. Explore a simulated experience of Universal Print.]

The road to simplification: Microsoft as the customer

A significant benefit of being a company as large, complex, and distributed as Microsoft is that we are a fantastic proving ground for new technology. If our teams can build a solution that works for our organization, we know it can work for other enterprises too. We also know that if we are experiencing a pain point, likely others are too. Because of this, we often call ourselves Customer Zero.

When it came to developing a modern solution for the needs of printing, our product groups knew who to turn to. Partnering with us in MDEE enabled the product team to develop Universal Print by testing with and taking feedback from the broad Microsoft team. The product group relied on our expertise with security review, OEM offerings, and first-hand admin feedback.

“With our partnership with MDEE we are able to gain experience as well as verifying the functionality of Universal Print,” says Jimmy Wu, senior product manager with the Universal Print team. “This helps us prove that this technology can scale to meet the needs of an enterprise as large and complex as Microsoft.”

In the last three years, Universal Print has come to eliminate the need for dedicated print servers and printer drivers, two significant headaches for admins and users alike. The one area that we hadn’t solved, until now, was the reliance on VPNs. We won’t be able to fully isolate the network printers from the core of our corporate infrastructure until we make this development.

“Using VPNs meant that every user trying to print something had to directly connect to the same network as the printer, which opens our networks to security threats. It increases the surface area for bad actors to attack,” Wu says.

Now, you send your print job to the cloud and you can “pull it down” to any printer you want, anywhere in the globe. It’s truly a universal system, and you no longer need a direct connection between your computer and the local printer you’re wanting to use. This eliminates the inherent security risk of having both the client computer and the printer on the same VPN network, while unlocking an exciting future for both improved security and an easier printing experience.

All together these changes have also resulted in significant cost savings for Microsoft and significant security and usability improvements. By simplifying our technology and reducing the scale of our infrastructure, we are realizing tens of millions of dollars in savings. This is a win-win outcome that we are all excited about.

Zero Trust: scaling security while also improving user experience.

Most employees around the globe these days are working in a hybrid setting, so when they visit one of our offices, we want their experience to be as seamless as possible. We are enabling this modern way of working by moving towards a Zero Trust environment.

Despite the intimidating name, Zero Trust provides smoother access to services for employees by ensuring user access is validated and authorized for each connection regardless of user location. In practice this means that you can easily log on to an on-campus network using the same device and same credentials you use in your home office. The experience is seamless, and the environment is more secure than ever.

This technology allows data to be transferred through secure tunnel connections. From an information security perspective this is now the gold standard for public or semi-public networks. We can further sequester our corporate network, which reduces risk to our core infrastructure. This concept is called least-privileged access, which accounts for more segmentation of users and a default to accessing only the common resources the average team member needs.

While we work towards modern security architectures, we’re also trying to minimize friction for our developers and our employees alike. “We do a real balance there. It’s a continued conversation of how we do better security while also continuing to improve the experience for folks, so it is just seamless,” Apple says.

To further this goal MDEE plans to leverage advances in Universal Print-ready printers supplied by OEM manufacturers which will connect directly to the cloud with their own Zero Trust. This new frontier is emerging through the partnership of Microsoft and manufacturers who are working together to improve printer technology to reduce complexity throughout the printing environment.

Now in 2023 we are in the process of moving all Microsoft end users over to Universal Print. With this solution we are quickly scaling up to support the whole company, worldwide. We’re now able to retire hardware and legacy solutions, and their associated risks. Fundamentally, we are shedding costs while gaining more robust security and better user experience.

Transforming the printing experience for a global workforce

While there are many employees in our headquarters backyard in the Pacific Northwest, the vast majority of our team actually work in field offices all over the globe. Being able to have a printing system that is cloud-based, which can be utilized in all our offices around the world, means a more direct connection to the business for our employees wherever they are. We can ensure that all employees’ experience is much better than it was previously.

Rolling out Universal Print affects every employee of ours and thus it is a critical task to get it right the first time. For our system admins, they now can centrally manage our printing networks and ensure a common way of operating our equipment globally, which for instance reduces printer outages as a central team can diagnose and fix issues quickly. We’ve also removed unnecessary layers of security management by utilizing the inherent, built-in security of Microsoft Azure. Again, this reduction in complexity also results in savings and increased security.

And from the perspective of our end users, we’ve moved to a system where everyone is utilizing the same service, with the same access. This scales and makes life faster for employees. The printing interface is much easier than before, and fewer printer outages getting in the way of your work is always welcome.

We are also looking at new developments right around the corner: employees will soon be able to use their own badges to release the “pull down” printing functionality, adding much-requested scanning features, and enabling admins to have better fleet management of our printers across the globe. Each of these features will further enhance user experience and admin efficiency.

“We’re changing the industry, which makes me very excited,” says Michael Munch, a senior service engineer with MDEE. “It’s not just the same old print story; it’s that we are finally arriving at the day where we can do this thing we’ve only dreamed about. It’s going to save us money, we’re going to be more secure, and it gets us ready for the future with zero-trust networking because the devices themselves will become native cloud devices.”

In essence, we’re seeing a win-win situation and the future is bright. “After presenting our plan for Universal Print the leadership quickly said, ‘Wait, you said it’s cheaper, and it’s more secure?’” says Munch, “Of course, it was a no-brainer to do.”

• Modern enterprise cloud printing is designed to provide modern security and seamless access to all printers for all users. It reduces friction for admins and users while making the enterprise more secure than ever.
• Zero Trust is an important part of keeping everyone safe and secure. By moving enterprise printing to the cloud, companies can verify user and device identity to reduce risk and keep the environment productive.
• Universal Print eliminates the need for dedicated print servers and printer drivers, which are significant headaches for admins and users alike. And by using Universal Print’s entire feature set MDEE will soon eliminate the inherent security risks of VPNs.

• Read our earlier blog post on Universal Print where we walk through our early steps to rethink our approach to printing here at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re Microsoft’s ‘Customer Zero.’
• Learn how we’re doing more with less internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure.
• Learn more about the foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork.
• Explore a simulated experience of Universal Print.

The post Seamless and secure cloud printing with Universal Print appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 Deployment and Adoption Guide

Read our step-by-step guide on deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 at your company. It’s based on our experience deploying it here at Microsoft:

• Full version
• eBook version
• Version for executives
• eBook version for executives

Microsoft Teams meetings help our globally distributed and digitally connected employees create meaningful hybrid work experiences. When those meetings are recorded and transcribed or their data becomes available to AI-powered digital assistants, their impact increases.

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

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

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

Policy considerations of Microsoft Teams meeting data retention

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

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

We tend to think of the recordings we make during meetings as an individual’s data, but they actually represent the company’s data. We want to empower individuals, but we have to remember that retention and volume impacts of these artifacts on the company can be substantial.

—Rachael Heade, director of records compliance, Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs

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

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

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

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

Asking the right questions to assemble the proper guardrails

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

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

As an organization, this is about thinking through your tenant position and getting it to a reasonable state.

—David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect, MSD

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

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

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

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

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

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

From sharing perspectives to crafting policy

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

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

—David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect, MSD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, MSD

A fix was needed, and quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

— Greg Baribault, group product manager, Microsoft Teams

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

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

Getting technical

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

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

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

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, MSD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading the room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating the boardroom

Building the Signature boardroom experience was challenging.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Transforming the executive boardroom meeting experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

And for good reason—The Hive is where we in Microsoft Digital (MSD), Microsoft’s IT organization, create cutting-edge meeting experiences that get rolled into Microsoft Teams Rooms, our video conferencing product in Microsoft Teams.

Our aim is to create innovative, inclusive hybrid meeting experiences for both our employees here at Microsoft, and for our Microsoft Teams Rooms customers. What better way to show off what we’re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, MSD team, The Hive

Until recently, The Hive has been an internal-facing resource where we, with our partners in Global Workplace Services and the Microsoft Teams Product Group, experimented with ways to improve meeting experiences at Microsoft.

However, as the work-from-home movement took off and customer interest in what we were doing in The Hive exploded, we made the decision to invite customers into our lab.

“Our aim is to create innovative, inclusive hybrid meeting experiences for both our employees here at Microsoft and for our Microsoft Teams Rooms customers,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager on our MSD team at The Hive. “What better way to show off what we’re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.”

To this end, our team has built a new customer experience at The Hive that features live demonstrations that show customers how to visualize how Microsoft Teams Rooms function in different settings.

Magic laboratory tours

Tours at The Hive are kind of like a meeting technology “speed dating” experience. Rather than just presenting a slide deck, we take a hands-on approach, spinning up a meeting (complete with realistic bot attendees) across a variety of spaces so customers can experience different room sizes, technologies, and scenarios in one walk through the facility. We can even invite their remote colleagues in for an additional point of view.

“We bring customers into The Hive, tour them through, and demonstrate how Microsoft creates cutting-edge meeting experiences in hybrid work environments,” Marzynski says. “And then we share our processes and know-how to help them create their own inclusive hybrid work meeting experiences at their companies.”

The tours are so popular that interest far exceeds our team’s capacity. In response, we’ve launched a streaming series called “The Hive Live,” where we invite account teams and customers for a live guided tour of our facility and a Q&A with our experts. We’ve also built virtual room tours, where you can go online to see how actual Teams Rooms look and feel around our campuses. “It’s kind of like teleporting around a house you’re interested in on a real estate site,” Marzynski says.

Microsoft Teams Rooms are represented as about a dozen different archetypes ranging from a Focus room for four people to an executive boardroom for over 30 people. These function as design references to inspire and unblock customers.

“Internally, we go super-deep with room specifications down to the last cable and screw required in the room,” Marzynski says. “While we do share those, it can be confusing when facing down a hybrid-work transformation challenge. Archetype thinking helps customers get out the weeds and imagine how to scale out a common room experience across a whole real estate portfolio.” Ultimately, our team is focused on using The Hive to empower our customers to build their own experiences using Teams Rooms and other Microsoft technologies.

Building innovative hybrid meeting experiences

Interacting with external customers at The Hive has allowed us to more deeply understand our customers and their pain points. Understandably, we learned that customers want to create a welcoming, inclusive hybrid work environment while controlling costs.

We’re not just working with expensive, experimental, showy new technologies at The Hive. We have three points of view through which we evaluate our work there: Capability, collaboration, and cost.

Capability refers to what people can accomplish in a meeting space with the right technology. Collaboration alludes to how we take advantage of moments that matter to make collective effort in meetings as seamless and productive as possible, and cost translates as ensuring that we’re driving value and recommending the most durable investments in hybrid work experiences.

With these central ideas in mind, The Hive created an entirely reimagined meeting room that we’re now using across the company—the Signature Teams Room.

Signature is the most evolved embodiment of Microsoft Teams Rooms. It’s designed to provide a fully inclusive and collaborative meeting experience for all attendees, whether they’re joining remotely or in-person. It includes specialized furniture, displays, cameras, and audio devices that are arranged in a way that makes it easier for all attendees to engage with each other.

“It’s where the engineering of the technology and the design of the furniture and physical environment are fully integrated to create the most hybrid-friendly, inclusive experience possible,” Marzynski says.

One of the key features of a Signature Teams Room is a relocated central focal point for meeting attendees.

In a traditionally laid-out meeting room, the focal point of the meeting tends to be the center of a table, as it has been since meetings were invented. Remote participants tend to be off to the side of the room on a monitor, away from this focal point.

“Remote attendees can feel like observers, rather than participants, in a poorly thought-out traditional design,” Marzynski says. “You’re looking through what feels like a security camera, at a room of people that are sitting around a table, often facing away from you. And the in-room experience suffers as well, since everyone is forced to pay a cognitive tax to simultaneously balance two different types of interactions in two different parts of the room.”

By altering the room’s layout and selecting complementing hardware, Signature Teams Rooms have what is called a “circle of inclusion,” which welcomes in remote attendees and places them at natural eye gaze points. The result is that hybrid meetings feel more organic than in a traditionally designed room, like sitting around a half-digital, half-physical conversation circle.

Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable. Employees are more likely to feel included and valued.

— Margie Strite, product marketing manager, Microsoft Teams

All Signature Teams Rooms have the following properties:

• In-person and remote attendees face each other
• Camera is at eye level
• Spatial audio can match a person’s voice to their location
• Remote participants have a clear view of everyone in the room

These seemingly small changes have a huge impact on how meetings are experienced.

Our solutions are very individualized. Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.

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

“Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable,” says Margie Strite, a product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams. “Employees are more likely to feel included and valued.”

Other small shifts, such as including a content camera aimed at an analog whiteboard for meetings or including digital collaboration devices like the Surface Hub, offer ways to increase engagement between in-person and remote participants. The exact methods used and specifications for each Signature Teams Room built can vary for each customer and are based on their unique scenarios.

“Our solutions are very individualized,” says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the MSD Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team at The Hive. “Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.”

At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible. We’re introducing new features and innovations with our internal product teams and key industry partners to create a playbook that enhances meeting experiences across all of our room archetypes – while driving down cost and complexity.

— Sam Albert, principal product manager at The Hive

The Hive also concentrates on resourcefulness, deploying meeting rooms that provide excellent hybrid meeting experiences while limiting costs.

Reducing costs while upgrading meeting rooms

The reduction of cost is vital when building a new meeting room experience can cost as much as building a new house.

While some organizations might be comfortable spending large amounts of their budget to update and improve meeting rooms, many want to strike a balance between experience and cost-efficiency. This is largely why The Hive focuses on creating individualized solutions with its Signature Teams Rooms. Most of the time, a lot of energy is put into making the most of what already exists within a room, rather than remodeling everything. There are also new, modular solutions being built within Microsoft.

“At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive. “We’re introducing new features and innovations with our internal product teams and key industry partners to create a playbook that enhances meeting experiences across all of our room archetypes—while driving down cost and complexity.”

A new low-cost, modular approach to deploying room solutions that our experts designed at The Hive bypasses the usual built-in technology and keeps costs down, even when the technology needs to be updated in the future.

We designed the modular solution so that in-person presenters and remote participants can all view raised hands, the person speaking, and the content being presented. We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.

— Danielle Chelles-Blair, senior designer, MSD

For example, in a large multi-purpose room, this solution features a mobile pod that works with Microsoft Teams Rooms and is equipped with audience-facing cameras, a presenter-tracking camera, and scalable audio. During a meeting room refresh at Microsoft, this modular solution helped cut our cost by 75 percent as compared to how we would traditionally upgrade the same meeting room.

Despite being more cost-effective and less intensive than traditional solutions, the modular solution is still designed to create inclusive hybrid meeting experiences.

Customers don’t necessarily want to be their own guinea pigs. The experimentation that The Hive does, and shares insights from, really saves other organizations time, money, and effort spent on finding the best meeting experience solutions.

— Margie Strite, product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams

“We designed the modular solution so that in-person presenters and remote participants can all view raised hands, the person speaking, and the content being presented,” says Danielle Chelles-Blair, a senior designer in MSD. “We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.”

In addition to inclusivity and cost-savings, for many organizations, the reduced trial-and-error to find effective meeting experience solutions is a marked benefit of turning to The Hive.

“Customers don’t necessarily want to be their own guinea pigs,” Strite says. “The experimentation that The Hive does, and shares insights from, really saves other organizations time, money, and effort spent on finding the best meeting experience solutions.”

Go here to see and virtually experience a Signature Teams Room for yourself.

To sign up for an upcoming Hive Live session, browse our topics and register here.

If you’re thinking about getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms, here are some tips to help you get started:

• Plan your deployment: Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to plan your deployment. This includes identifying the rooms where you want to deploy Microsoft Teams Rooms, selecting the right hardware, and ensuring that your network infrastructure is ready for video conferencing.
• Get familiar with the features: Microsoft Teams Rooms comes with a range of features that can help you make the most of your video conferencing experience. Some of these features include one-touch join, proximity detection, and content sharing. It’s important to get familiar with these features so that you can use them effectively during your meetings.
• Ensure that your devices are up-to-date: To ensure that you have the best possible experience with Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to keep your devices up to date. This includes updating the firmware on your cameras, displays, and audio devices.
• Train your users: Finally, it’s important to train your users on how to use Microsoft Teams Rooms effectively. This includes teaching them how to join meetings, how to share content, and how to troubleshoot common issues.

Get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms.

• Read more about signature Microsoft Teams Rooms: A more inclusive and collaborative vision for hybrid meeting rooms.
• Discover crafting a new hybrid meeting room experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.
• Explore deploying signature Microsoft Teams Rooms with generative AI.
• Unpack how Microsoft internally deploys signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.

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 Buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology internally at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When Microsoft recently opened its new Microsoft Canada headquarters building in downtown Toronto, it did so with a lot of transformative smart building capabilities that people keep asking Eric Wand about.

Wand, a Toronto-based director of business programs on the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team, talks with customers a lot, and lately they’ve been asking him about his new office.

Watch our interview with Wand to learn more about his role, including his view on deploying Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms at the new Toronto headquarters building. “It bridges that divide between being physically present in the room and those who are remote,” Wand says. “It allows any attendee—whether they’re remote or in the room—to be seen, to be heard, and to feel included.”

He also speaks to how AI is transforming everything about our work here at Microsoft among other topics.

• Check out our blog post on deploying Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms at Microsoft.
• Explore how we’re rethinking meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Unpack the spotlight on Digital Transformation series.

The post Deploying Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms, generative AI at new Microsoft Canada headquarters appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Over the last two years, we’ve all had to radically adjust how we meet and collaborate as most information workers transitioned to remote work. Almost overnight, in-person and hybrid meetings moved online. Even daily interactions with colleagues morphed into online meetings, resulting in a 58 percent increase in Microsoft Teams meetings usage at Microsoft. For better or worse, “virtual coffee chats” became the new normal, and the water cooler moved online.

Researchers at Microsoft and across the industry have worked hard to understand the impact of these changes and to determine how to improve meetings so they achieve their purpose through empowered participants. One of these large studies came to an interesting conclusion: the odds of a meeting being rated as effective are two times higher if attendees say the meeting was inclusive, and more than three times higher when attendees feel comfortable participating.

In other words, inclusive meetings are the most effective meetings. Remarkably, as we’ve adjusted to the new normal of remote work, meeting satisfaction at Microsoft increased by 31 points! The primary reason? Prior to the pandemic, remote participants were less likely to be active participants in hybrid meetings. Now that the playing field is leveled, participants report being more comfortable participating in online meetings. Across the company, we’re learning to be more inclusive and meetings are becoming more participatory.

So, how can you make your meetings more inclusive? Here are some practical tips that we’ve learned running remote and hybrid meetings at Microsoft.

1. Limit meeting invites to necessary attendees

Be thoughtful about who you invite to your meeting. Make sure roles are clear and everyone understands why they are there and how they can contribute. Provide a place outside of the scheduled meeting to engage and view the artifacts or bring others into the conversation. Record your meeting and remember that hybrid meetings don’t always have to be a “point in time” exercise—they can be a gathering place for ongoing collaboration, grounded in the initial conversation but extending beyond the original participants and agenda. This is particularly important for teams that span time zones!

2. Keep meetings short

Research shows that remote and hybrid workers experience increased fatigue from too much time spent in meetings. Fatigue begins to increase 30–40 minutes into video meetings, so keep meetings as short as possible—30 minutes max—or plan breaks in the schedule for longer meetings. Starting and ending meetings on time is a significant stress reducer for your attendees. Also, consider a buffer between meetings.

Could you start at five minutes after the hour to give people time to recharge? Or end five minutes early? You can even set up Microsoft Outlook to automatically end meetings early using the “end meetings early” option under File > Options > Calendar > Calendar Options > Shorten appointments and meetings. I’ve made this a requirement for my leadership team meetings—it’s made our meetings more focused and our days a little less hectic!

3. Always provide an agenda!

Agendas appear throughout the available research as an indicator of a meeting’s effectiveness. Meetings without clear agendas contribute to increased frustration and meeting fatigue, while well-run meetings with clear communication are associated with better perceived productivity. You can even implement a more radical policy in your enterprise, requiring an agenda for mandatory meetings or letting your team know that a meeting without a published agenda should be considered optional.

4. Camera shy? Still consider turning on video

In remote and hybrid meetings, sharing video creates rapport with colleagues. Studies have highlighted the importance of observing body language and facial expressions to build positive group dynamics. However, there are some situations where video may not be appropriate, including large meetings (when you aren’t presenting), when bandwidth is poor, and when video contributes to meeting fatigue. For those cases, update your Microsoft 365 profile with a photo or an avatar that represents something about your personality to help other meeting attendees relate to you when you choose not to share video. If the camera isn’t your thing, try making a commitment to start meetings with your camera on to build some rapport, then turning it off once the meeting is underway. And try to relax—you look great on camera!

5. Send pre-reads and follow-ups

Preparation and clear communication are vital in today’s remote and hybrid work environment. Share any tools or files you’ll use during your meeting in advance, along with the meeting agenda. After your meeting ends, immediately send follow-up materials or notes and be sure to record and transcribe the meeting so those who can’t attend synchronously have access. Focus on capturing well-defined action items with owners and due dates, since an action owner in another time zone might not have been able to attend the meeting synchronously.

6. Establish norms

Make a point of establishing participatory norms for the meeting. For example, should attendees raise their hand, unmute, speak up, or use chat when they have questions and comments? Or, if the agenda is tight, would you prefer them to save questions for the end of the meeting? If you expect everyone to turn on video for a face-to-face conversation, state this in your invitation so no one is caught off guard. Also, inform attendees before starting a recording or transcription.

7. Have everyone join the Teams meeting

As more people globally return to worksites, many meetings will likely have a mix of people joining remotely and from a meeting room. Whether employees are joining from home, on the road from their mobile, from their own desk, or together with others in a conference room, they should feel equally included in the meeting.

You can accomplish this by centering your meeting in Teams rather than in the meeting room. Encourage everyone, even those who attend in person, to join the Teams meeting. From there they can participate in chat, use reactions, and raise their hand when they have something to contribute.

8. Make meetings interactive!

It can be challenging to manage a remote or hybrid meeting, but the more interactive the session, the more likely you are to achieve the desired outcome. Once norms are established, be on the lookout for people who come off mute—it’s normally a sign they have something to add. Look for people who raise their virtual hand and keep an eye on the chat window for questions or shared insights, then repeat them for all participants. Depending on the size of the meeting, it may be beneficial to select a moderator to watch for raised hands and questions in the meeting chat then have the moderator facilitate a brief meeting retrospective to ensure participants felt seen and heard. Chats can add depth to a meeting, especially when participants use emojis or GIFs (when appropriate and aligned to local law or custom). Encourage users to express themselves with live reactions. Finally, consider ways to incorporate additional interactive elements, like a Teams Whiteboard, a poll, or through an embedded app. This recent article from Harvard Business Review includes some fun tips to make meetings more engaging that require no technology at all.

While some of these suggestions may seem self-evident, building a culture that routinely and instinctively implements these best practices is challenging. If you’d like additional inspiration, our peers over at the Microsoft 365 blog recently featured a great article detailing seven strategies for building a healthier meeting culture.

Check out Microsoft’s internal Microsoft Teams Meeting guide.

Learn how Microsoft is using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance end-user support.

Read how Microsoft is implementing a Zero Trust security model.

The post Microsoft’s tips for staying productive in an evolving hybrid world appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In the most recent episode of our Inside Track “Spotlight” video series, Microsoft Inside Track leader Keith Boyd talks to Claire Sisson, a principal group program manager in Microsoft Digital, as well as Sara Bush, a principal program manager and member of her team, about the different ways that Microsoft Teams is digitally transforming the employee experience at Microsoft.

In the video you’ll discover how Microsoft Teams is more than platform for video-based meetings—it’s Microsoft’s “digital fabric” that enables our employees to collaborate seamlessly, regardless of where they are. You’ll also learn about Microsoft Teams Premium, Microsoft Teams Mesh, get some tips for more effective and inclusive hybrid meetings, as well as learn about some of the features in Teams that maybe you weren’t aware of but will be glad you discovered thanks to some helpful tips from Claire and Sara.

• Read the blog post that inspired this video: Transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.
• Explore how Microsoft Digital improves its own Employee Experience—and yours—as Customer Zero.
• Discover driving inclusive and effective meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.

The post Enabling hybrid work internally at Microsoft with ‘digital fabric’ Microsoft Teams appeared first on Inside Track Blog.