Audience targeting in SharePoint is a powerful tool, but it hasn’t always been easy or fast to configure. That’s been a challenge inside Microsoft, where it’s been a blocker for moving some of the company’s major internal portals to the modern SharePoint experience.

That’s changing.

Microsoft disclosed a new audience targeting capability for the modern SharePoint experience at Ignite 2018, around the same time the company started using it. The public release of the feature is coming soon for all customers.

Audience targeting gets the right content to the right audiences—it personalizes your employees’ view of news and information, says Sam Crewdson, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital. Microsoft uses SharePoint to run the big internal portals that support 230,000 employees and vendors, and it’s important to have the portals be personalized and relevant.

For example, Microsoft uses audience targeting on its primary company portal, MSW.

“It doesn’t make sense to show an employee in Australia information about a blood drive outside a building in Redmond,” Crewdson says. “It’s not bad for them to see it or know about it, it just isn’t relevant in their day. Using audience targeting, we are able to show the story only to people who can benefit from seeing it.”

Seeds of audience targeting in modern SharePoint

Crewdson says SharePoint Online’s modern experience is an upgrade over the SharePoint Online classic experience, which replicated the old on-premises version of SharePoint and didn’t have as many new features and capabilities as the product team wanted. Modern SharePoint experiences give end users powerful, accessible, mobile-ready sites with a minimum of custom development needed. The Microsoft SharePoint product team has been working hard to evolve SharePoint over the past few years, he says. As a result, the adoption rate of these new, modern sites at Microsoft has been high—nearly 75 percent have already transitioned to modern.

Adoption of modern had already been a success, but there were some features that needed to be integrated into the product in order to unblock some of our larger portal owners from across the company from taking the plunge.

—Sam Crewdson Principal Program Manager at Microsoft

Those that didn’t move quickly cited the lack of audience targeting as a blocker.

In 2017, Crewdson, who is responsible for mapping out how to move the company’s internal portals to modern (which began with moving most sites and portals into Office 365), and Dave Cohen, the product team program manager responsible for modernizing the overall SharePoint publishing system, talked candidly about what it would take to move major sites like MSW from the classic publishing infrastructure to the modern experience.

“Adoption of modern had already been a success, but there were some features that needed to be integrated into the product in order to unblock some of our larger portal owners from across the company from taking the plunge,” Crewdson says. “Audience targeting was high on that list for us.”

Since then, the product group, Microsoft Digital, and the managers of the company’s intranet portals have worked together to prioritize, test, and deliver many of the features Crewdson and Cohen discussed (with more to come). “With audience targeting and all the other new SharePoint features, we feel like we are now ready as an enterprise to move our most important internal sites to modern,” Crewdson says.

Modern audience targeting becomes a reality

Microsoft intranet site owners began as early adopters, using the new targeting capability back in September 2018.

It took just a few clicks.

“It used to be that you needed a SharePoint Ph.D. in order to use the audience targeting feature effectively,” Crewdson says. “SharePoint intranet sites have always been developed internally with audience targeting built in to the user experience, it just took a lot of work and time—days, even months—to set it up properly.”

And specialized help was often needed.

“When owners of our larger, company-wide portals wanted to surface content that was relevant to an individual or group, location, or organization, they generally had to work with a SharePoint developer to make that happen,” he says.

Things have changed quite a bit since then. Now, all you need to do to configure audience targeting is define the relevant Office 365 groups or security groups that should see your content and, boom, you’re off and running.

Crewdson says the audience targeting will be a part of a few key, existing web parts and will be added into future web parts, page improvements, and other new features in SharePoint Online, including hub sites and mega menu navigation.

Using audience targeting

“A demo makes it easy to see what you can do with audience targeting,” Crewdson says. He ran through an example of how someone could target news articles to individuals or groups—all managed in Azure Active Directory (AAD).

Here’s how you can do it:

Go to your Site Pages library, Library settings, Audience targeting settings, and select the Enable modern audience targeting checkbox. Then, in the audience column of the Site Pages library, select the group you want to target. Finally, add the News web part to the page and turn on Enable audience targeting.

Audience targeting can be used to serve up relevant news and highlights. The web parts on the page are then aware of who is logged in and whether they are a member of the group targeted. “If they are, they’ll see the content,” Crewdson says. “If they are not, they won’t. Simple.”

When the audience targeting feature is released publicly later this winter, site owners will be able to target Office 365 groups and security groups.

“Companies already have security groups either created in the cloud or synchronized from Active Directory on-premises, so for them there will be very little-to-no investment,” Cohen says. “Our SharePoint customers can start saving money and time right away.”

When it comes to the teams that manage the many internal portals at Microsoft, the story gets better.

“Our portal managers love it because it removes the need for IT engagement from the equation,” Crewdson says. “They can provision a new portal, create items using audience targeting, and have it up and running the same day without needing to get a developer. And they have a dynamic portal that serves each user in the most relevant way. Keeping it fresh, creating a higher return value to the end user.”

Targeting, not permissions

Crewdson highlighted the fact that audience targeting is not a replacement for permissions, rather, it’s an augmentation. “Audience targeting is meant to show users the content which is most useful to them in their role or location,” he says. “If content needs to be secured, site owners should also set the permissions on the content.”

Audience targeting is just one of many new features that are motivating portal owners to shift to modern.

“With it, and everything else that’s been released in the last year, we expect that the majority of our internal portals will be moving to modern,” Crewdson says. “2019 will be the ‘Year of Modern at Microsoft.’”

• Explore evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva
• Check out how Microsoft’s HR portal gets personal, thanks to the modern experience in SharePoint
• Discover reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a Hybrid World

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The post New audience targeting tool propels move to modern SharePoint experience inside Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

Within Microsoft, there are some entrenched employee habits that make the company what it is, like living in email, dressing casually, and project managing a solution for every problem.

Also high on that list?

Saving files locally, a habit that has stuck with a company that grew up around Windows and its system of using folders to store and organize files.

Now, the company wants its employees to store everything in the cloud on OneDrive for Business, where it’ll be more secure and easy to access, plus several other reasons that will be shared below.

But first, about changing the entrenched habit of clicking File, Save As, and then navigating to your favorite folder on drive C.

“We thought about asking our employees to change their behavior, but then we asked ourselves, ‘Why? This is how our employees like to work,’” says Anne Marie Suchanek, a program manager on the team that manages OneDrive for Business internally in Microsoft Digital.

Instead, Microsoft Digital worked with the Microsoft OneDrive Sync team to deploy a feature called Known Folder Move (also available to external customers) that makes it possible for employees to save documents, and pictures to their file folder system the same way they always have. The only difference when they save their content via that familiar local drive file path is that their content also will automatically save to OneDrive for Business.

“Why change a good thing?” asks Suchanek, who is currently leading a rollout of the file-saving experience within Microsoft in North America. “We decided to go to them with a solution that will allow them to keep doing things the way they like to do them.”

Known Folder Move very specifically mimics the exact motions that employees (and all Windows users) have used for decades to save files—the only difference is now Microsoft and its employees enjoy the security and convenience of having their content automatically saved in the cloud.

Suchanek’s Microsoft Digital team is currently rolling out the feature via an email announcement that encourages employees to adopt early. After the opt-in phase finishes, the team will—after letting them know that it’s coming—silently deploy the system to everyone in North America (except those employees whose complex folder workflows would be disrupted by such a move). When North America is finished, the plan is to expand to the rest of the world.

It’s all part of the company’s journey to the cloud.

“We want to be a cloud-first company,” Suchanek says. “That means doing everything we can to embrace all the different features of the cloud, and part of that is getting our corporate data on the cloud.”

Getting employees on board

Saving to the cloud is something most employees are already doing, given that OneDrive for Business has been an option for employees for quite a while, says Eva Etchells, a program manager on Microsoft Digital’s End User Readiness and Communications team. She also said many of them are accustomed to backing up their personal data on the version of OneDrive that supports their personal Microsoft email accounts.

“Mostly I’m just raising awareness about it so that they’re not surprised when it pops up as an alert,” says Etchells, who has the role of answering employee questions about deployments of new features like this. “I let them know it’s not malware.”

The main challenge is for developers who use intricate systems of folders to store their code on their individual PCs—a system that needs to stay intact to work correctly.

“We’re allowing those employees to opt out,” Suchanek says. “The product group is working on improvements that will improve the experience for engineers who migrate their PC folders to the cloud.”

Etchells says she’s mainly talking to employees about the benefits of moving their files to the cloud, which include being able to access files from any approved device; having everything backed up if something happens to your PC; being able to collaborate and share any file, even those on your desktop or in your documents folder; and better security.

That’s not the biggest benefit, however.

“The thing that wins them over is finding out that they’re going to get five terabytes of storage space,” says Etchells, who communicates openly with employees on Yammer. “Why would I put anything on my dev box if I’m going to have that much space? There is literally no reason to not do this.”

Suchanek says moving to the cloud brings a whole set of benefits regarding coauthoring.

“We want people to work in the cloud and to collaborate in the cloud,” she says. “When they do, this problem of creating many versions of the same document and then trying to merge them all together goes away. Once a document is saved into OneDrive, everyone is automatically working out of the same version.”

Making OneDrive better

The OneDrive product team rolled out the Known Folder Move feature 18 months ago to help deliver a modern desktop experience and drive engagement with OneDrive by allowing users to sync where they are accustomed to saving their files, says Gaia Carini, a principal PM manager on the OneDrive and SharePoint Team.

“We think of deploying this feature as a critical step toward having a modern desktop experience,” Carini says. “We are recommending that all of our customers take the necessary steps to make sure their important files are in OneDrive.”

She says Microsoft is no exception, and that she’s happy to see the company using Known Folder Move.

“We are excited to partner with Microsoft Digital to leverage some of those same benefits within Microsoft,” Carini says.

She says getting feedback and adoption from Microsoft employees helps the product group improve features before they are rolled out to customers—something that’s very useful to the product and the company at large.

For example, many customers have been waiting on the ability to deploy the Known Folder Move for users with local OneNote notebooks saved in their documents folder.

“If you have one of those notebooks, you can’t use Known Folder Move to move it to the cloud,” she says. “Fixing that has been a major request by some of our external customers. Microsoft Digital has been helping us validate our solution within the Microsoft deployment rings, which has been a big help.”

• Learn more about using the Known Folder Move feature at your company.

The post OneDrive for Business feature shifts how employees save files within Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“The company’s employees use Teams as their primary client for calling, holding meetings, chatting, and collaborating with colleagues,” says Frank Delia, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital. Think of it as the place for your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.

“It’s the single screen where employees can have a conversation right alongside their work in real time, whether coauthoring a document, attending a meeting, or collaborating on projects across apps and services,” Delia says.

On the other hand, Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) powers communities that connect people across teams and organizations across Microsoft.

“It allows leaders to engage with employees at every level while enabling organizations and departments to communicate at scale,” Delia says.

Diving a bit deeper, Viva Engage communities empower employees to share their knowledge, find experts, and get answers from their peers—all while fostering an inclusive culture where they can connect with each other around shared interests and experiences. It’s the place where people can have company-wide discussions, engage in the company’s cultural transformation, and connect in communities that cross the boundaries of their day-to-day work.

“If you’re trying to reach a large audience, then Viva Engage is a good interactive platform to do that,” Delia says. “Our CEO sponsors a community that brings people across all levels of the company into conversations with senior leaders about our company strategy.”

In contrast, when someone wants to collaborate with their direct colleagues, they do it in Microsoft Teams.

“Teams is well-suited to work for a team trying to accomplish a specific task,” Delia says. “It’s a hub for teamwork.”

Viva Engage is inherently open and content is discoverable by default.

“People who haven’t joined a community can discover conversations and be @mentioned to solicit their input,” Delia says. “Teams is about an invited set of people chatting. If you aren’t explicitly added to the team, you won’t see the conversation. Viva Engage conversations reach people who otherwise wouldn’t see the conversation.”

Better together

Delia says Microsoft employees are finding smart ways to use Teams and Viva Engage together. Now, notifications for both show up in the Teams activity feed.

“Every team is different,” Delia says. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to collaboration.”

When people at Microsoft need help on something and don’t know who to turn to, they might ask their colleagues in a community for help or find and post questions within Answers in Viva. Many employees might jump on the thread to troubleshoot the problem. Often, an expert gets @mentioned by someone watching the conversation and join the thread with an official explanation or product information.

The two organizations that build Teams and Viva Engage use each other’s products every day.

“Even the Microsoft Teams development group uses Viva Engage to share the latest product information and in-turn get feedback from their fans in the Microsoft Teams community in Viva Engage,” Delia says. “And vice versa––the Viva Engage team uses Teams chat for spontaneous collaboration.”

Throughout Microsoft, product teams work in Teams and use Viva Engage to connect with people across the organization to answer questions, solicit feedback, and crowdsource ideas for new features, Delia says. Viva Engage communities act as a front door for each team.

Each product has its own strengths.

“Viva Engage embraces a sense of openness, and a desire to have single conversations on important topics,” Delia says. “Because I can find or a colleague can share a conversation even if I’m not a member of a community, I don’t have to follow everything. It allows our community to work together to solve challenges.”

Answering thorny questions

What happens when a thorny question comes up on a Viva Engage thread? That’s when the conversation might switch to Microsoft Teams. The experts can move the conversation into a designated Teams channel where they can talk candidly with their fellow subject matter experts about how to answer the tough question, agree on how to respond, and then head back to Viva Engage to share their best answer or preferred solution.

Eva Etchells, a program manager on Microsoft Digital’s End User Readiness and Communications team, is one of those who uses both Viva Engage and Teams to get her job done.

“My whole thing is to live in Viva Engage,” says Etchells, who sits on the team that answers common IT-related questions that employees post in Viva Engage. “We’re a catchall for all the work issues people have—sometimes we’re the librarians for the company.”

Etchells says she uses Teams to find and contact subject matter experts who know the answers to specific questions, and then she invites them to provide answers directly in Viva Engage.

“Not everybody is in Viva Engage,” Etchells says. “Our most important job is to make sure the questions our employees have get answered, and we use both Viva Engage and Teams to do that.”

“Teams is for working with people you know, chat, calling, projects, and so on,” Delia says. “Viva Engage is for community building, organization-wide conversations, and finding knowledge, information, and answers from people that you may not know or even know how to find.”

Happy collaborating.

• Discover migrating Microsoft Viva Engage to Native Mode unlocks the benefits of Microsoft 365.
• Explore transforming employee engagement at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Engage.
• Unpack Viva la Vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.

The post Unpacking how Microsoft employees collaborate on Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When Microsoft moved to Microsoft Teams for all communications, it needed a good plan.

More than 250,000 employees and licensed vendors would be affected by the shift, as would 600,000 guests that the company collaborates with on a regular basis.

The one thing we had to get right to make sure our company-wide transition to Teams was successful was to deploy the governance framework that comes with Microsoft 365.

~David Johnson, principal program manager, Microsoft 365 product strategy and development for Microsoft Digital

Too much was at stake to allow anything to go wrong.

“The one thing we had to get right to make sure our company-wide transition to Teams was successful was to deploy the governance framework that comes with Microsoft 365,” says David Johnson, who leads Microsoft 365 product strategy and deployment governance inside Microsoft Digital. “Governance was critical.”

Mission accomplished.

Microsoft Teams has been the company’s collaboration platform for more than two years. With a full set of communications capabilities, including chat, voice and video meetings, and calling, Microsoft Teams has become the place where employees work all the time, especially as they work remotely due to COVID-19.

Governance refers to the policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that a company like Microsoft uses to help ensure their IT resources are being effectively deployed and managed, and that data security and compliance standards are in place while still allowing employees get their work done. An effective governance framework can streamline deploying solutions like Microsoft Teams, ensure all systems are secure and compliant, and generally make sure its technology does what it’s supposed to do.

“Our foundation for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams governance within Microsoft is tied to how we manage and govern Microsoft 365 Groups inside the company,” Johnson says. “Groups are the common layer under Teams, SharePoint team sites, Yammer Communities, Outlook groups, and a lot more.”

Put simply, governance is setting things up so people can be their most productive selves.

“We want to let our employees do their thing, but we want to make sure we give them guardrails and watch for things that could get them in trouble,” Johnson says.

The deployment of Microsoft Teams was a success in large part because the Microsoft Digital team relied on the governance framework they designed for the Microsoft 365 workloads they had already deployed internally, says Emily Kirby, who was a program manager on Microsoft Digital’s Microsoft Teams deployment team when rolling it out across the company.

“Because we had previously established governance for Microsoft 365 services, such as SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Word, and other apps, those policies and guidelines were able to smoothly carry over to Teams,” Kirby says. “What makes Teams unique within Microsoft 365 and as a platform overall is that, during our deployment, it worked like an intelligent shell. Teams automatically inherited the permissions and policies set for the other services so that, for example, when people work on files in Teams, or use other Microsoft 365 services within Teams, they work within the governance parameters of those other services.”

[Learn more how Microsoft Digital used Microsoft Azure’s governance toolset to enable enterprise-scale governance design and compliance enforcement across the company’s entire Azure environment.]

Governing collaborative employees

Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork that enables people to work together by bringing chat, calling, meetings, files, and Microsoft 365 and third-party apps together in one place, Johnson says. Because it’s built on Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams is part of a common underlying data graph that unifies all Microsoft 365 products and services. This ultimately enables AI and machine learning to help people easily accomplish tasks and focus on what matters most.

However, making this kind of unfettered collaboration work while also protecting the company requires security measures smart enough to control access based on need, that recognize and disable broad access when a team no longer needs a set of information anymore, and that help Microsoft Digital quickly identify and fix security issues when they pop up.

Microsoft Digital has partnered with the Microsoft 365 product group to inform the development of Microsoft 365 governance capabilities for all customers.

The partnership between the two has helped simplify the company’s thinking.

“Our thinking around governance is evolving,” Johnson says. “We’ve seen first-hand the difference it makes to have a well-developed governance framework in place for every service we roll out.”

One of the big insights was that delivering a unified approach to governance that runs across all Microsoft 365 services would simplify and strengthen the company’s overall approach, he says. When you handle the security of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Word, and all the other Microsoft 365 products in exactly the same way on top of the same underlying graph, there are far fewer breakdowns, seams exposed, or other ways for things to go wrong.

“All of the things employees do at work are coming together in a common construct,” Johnson says. “It makes it so we only need to secure everything once, whether it be bridge auditing, establishing policies to protect data, labeling groups, and so on.”

That’s the beauty of it. We got to take all of the goodness of SharePoint governance, all the security inside OneDrive, all of the learnings that have been applied to the entire Microsoft graph—we got to absorb all of that into Teams.

~Emily Kirby, program manager on Microsoft Digital’s Microsoft Teams deployment team

It’s that kind of thinking that grounded the team that deployed Microsoft Teams across the company, Kirby says.

“That’s the beauty of it,” she says. “We got to take all of the goodness of SharePoint governance, all the security inside OneDrive, all of the learnings that have been applied to the entire Microsoft graph—we got to absorb all of that into Teams.”

Smart search needs good governance

Giving employees access to create and collaborate with others is core to Microsoft Digital’s mission, and protecting the company’s assets go hand in hand with that, Johnson says.

He says the team has been working to optimize legal and retention capabilities, so data is preserved for only as long as needed while not losing things that will be needed in the future.

Microsoft also wants to work on making it easier for employees to collaborate with customers and partners outside of the company, on onboarding new products and processes, and on transforming search so employees can find whatever information they’re looking for no matter where it resides. This includes using AI and machine learning to do things like suggest and rank relevant search results that the employee might not otherwise come across.

“If you don’t have good governance, then you can’t do these things,” Johnson says.

• Learn more how Microsoft Digital used Microsoft Azure’s governance toolset to enable enterprise-scale governance design and compliance enforcement across the company’s entire Azure environment.

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