AI is a game changer when it comes to improving how our corporate functions operate. At least that is what we at Microsoft, and many in the tech industry, have been claiming over the past year or so… but where is the proof?

This article is the first in a series dedicated to showing how our Microsoft Digital team, the IT organization here at Microsoft, is collaborating with our internal partners to use AI to accelerate growth and radically improve operational efficiencies, specifically for corporate functions such as HR, legal, and real estate. The hope is that by providing concrete examples and outcomes, we can provide our customers with inspiration, a blueprint, and in some cases, a solution, to do the same.

Within Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the digital experience here at Microsoft, we have the pleasure of working day in and day out with our corporate function partners across the company. From HR and legal, to our real estate team, all are being asked to do more with less, with a focus on keeping operational costs down while maintaining or improving productivity. As a partner to these organizations, it’s our job to find ways to allow them to do just that!

And we’re sure it comes as no surprise that AI has been at the center of all this, playing a fundamental role in transforming business workflows while improving operational efficiency, user productivity, regulatory and corporate compliance, and data-driven decision making.

Over the last year, we’ve seen how it can revolutionize the way our internal corporate functions operate by automating repetitive and time-consuming operational tasks. Let’s look at our internal project, an AI-powered document lifecycle management platform, as one of the first examples of this. 

“With AI, we have so many new ways to innovate. From saving valuable time for our legal professionals, to optimizing building occupancy, to helping our HR professionals support employees in the hybrid workplace, to enabling many self-service experiences for our employees; we have incredible potential to make our corporate functions more efficient and impactful,” says Patrice Pelland, a partner software group engineering manager for HR & CELA in Microsoft Digital.

Document management gets a major makeover

Our new AI-powered platform aims to empower our corporate functions teams by revolutionizing end-to-end document management. From crafting templates, authoring documents, and facilitating collaboration to orchestrating seamless workflows, offering secure storage, and managing records, this system uses AI enriched capabilities to bring operational efficiencies, reduce costs, and ensure accurate compliance to any document-based process.

“This platform was developed to address the critical need for end-to-end document management across various verticals within Microsoft,” says Mohit Chand, a principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “It was created to streamline processes like digitizing documents and address the common pain points that typically makes this activity take months to complete.”

The Microsoft Digital team set out to develop the document lifecycle management platform with six core principles in mind:

1. Automation empowerment: Automate document management to enhance productivity and efficiency.
2. Seamless integration: Integrate with Microsoft 365 and Azure for a seamless user experience.
3. AI-driven innovation: Use cutting-edge AI technology to enhance functionalities in search and analysis.
4. User-centric design: Focus on intuitive interfaces that simplify complex functionalities.
5. Scalable flexibility: Adapt to the needs of different organization sizes and processes.
6. Cost efficiency: Reduce operational costs through optimized document processes.

Transforming our document lifecycle

The team used Microsoft 365, Azure Open AI, Azure Cognitive Services, and Microsoft Purview to create the following system capabilities:

• Template digitization and management: Digitize and manage templates by creating and modifying snippets and operational data fields.
• Secure and controlled editing: Easily manage and update templates and snippets with controlled workflows to ensure only approved and published templates are used.
• Efficient document drafting: Start with standard templates and dynamically assemble documents, incorporating required metadata and content snippets seamlessly in Word.
• Streamlined approval processes: Automate review and approval workflows, integrate eSignatures, and keep everyone updated with real-time notifications and status changes.
• Smart ingestion and storage: Automatically ingest documents, perform validation checks, and securely store them while keeping track of all changes and updates.
• Intelligent content analysis: Extract and use metadata and content snippets for enhanced document classification, improving search capabilities and document retrieval using both keyword and natural language processing (NLP) techniques.
• Automated compliance enforcement: Apply retention labels, manage document lifecycles, and enforce policies to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory standards.

“Our intention after aligning on the core principles and key platform capabilities was to reduce the digitization process from three to six months to less than fourteen days,” says Andrew Voss, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “It was a North Star goal that I’m happy to say has now been achieved for all of our onboarded processes thus far.”

No gaming around: The results speak volumes

One of the first internal organizations to put the new platform to the test was Xbox as they looked to automate one of their most frequent contract types, a critical process for onboarding new games into the Xbox ecosystem. Historically, this process was manual, involving non-digitized templates and redundant data entry across multiple systems, consuming 1,800 hours annually. The manual contract creation process was more than just time-consuming, it could also be error-prone and significantly delay the onboarding of new content and impact service level agreements (SLAs).

In fact, the solution has saved the Xbox team over 1,600 hours resulting in an 88% time savings in the contract generation process, reducing the time it takes for these contracts from 1,800 hours to just 158 hours annually!

“The amount of business impact and return on investment that we’ve been able to deliver by partnering with the Microsoft Digital team has been outstanding,” says Hoss Hostetler, a senior service engineer in Xbox. “The ability to automate initial contract generation from configured templates through to sending out signatures and getting notified of fully signed contracts via application programming interfaces (APIs) has been absolutely game-changing for our team.”

Xbox has been so encouraged by the initial outcome of their results that they are preparing to extend the solution to automate two more of their standard contracts. By doing this, the team is anticipating an additional 600+ hours per year in time savings.

“Our collaboration with Xbox showcases the effectiveness of this solution for optimizing complex business processes,” says Alpa Jain, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “As Xbox continues to expand their use across a wider range of contract types, we are committed to introducing new technical advancements that will contribute to the platform’s growing autonomy, adaptability, and sophistication.”

Making its way to our customers through SharePoint Premium

While the AI-powered platform started as an end-to-end document management solution for our internal Microsoft Corporate Functions teams, many of its capabilities will be showing up in SharePoint Premium. SharePoint Premium is Microsoft’s advanced content management and experiences platform for customers and brings AI, automation, and added security to content experiences, processing, and governance.

This collaboration with the SharePoint team exemplifies Microsoft Digital’s internal innovation being leveraged for external product development. The transfer of knowledge, capabilities, and insights from the internal document management product and Microsoft Digital team is sure to make the SharePoint Premium product much more effective for our customers from the get-go.

“This represents a unique case where Microsoft Digital, as Customer Zero, developed a product to solve the needs and challenges that our internal corporate function customers face, and that solution is now being incorporated into an external customer-facing product,” says Bidyadhar Patra, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “For us, this approach highlights a new way of leveraging internal needs for broader product development.”

Here are some suggestions for how you can take a similar approach to transforming your content lifecycle with AI at your company:

• AI is accelerating corporate functions growth across HR, legal, and real estate through operational efficiency, automated compliance, data-driven insights, and productivity for individuals. 
• By using AI and natural language processing, corporate function leaders can digitize templates for any business process, streamline reviews with AI-assisted analysis, and easily govern their documents with considerable time savings results. The document lifecycle management platform, developed within Microsoft Digital, is a great first example of this.
• Don’t fall behind when it comes to AI, the time is now to start experimenting with and using these technologies to improve business results and maximize return on investment.

Learn more about SharePoint Premium and give it a try.

• Learn how we’re reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint Premium.
• Find out how our employees are leveraging the cloud for file storage with OneDrive Folder Backup.
• Check out how we’re empowering employee self-service with guardrails with sensitivity labels.

• 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 AI is revolutionizing the way we support corporate functions at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we’ve rolled out SharePoint Premium across the company, including in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization where we’re using it to transform how the company manages its content.

SharePoint is the backbone of our content management and collaboration strategy. We use it to enable our employees to access, share, and co-create documents across teams and devices for more than 600,000 sites containing 350 million pieces of content and more than 12 petabytes of data. It’s at the core of everything we do, from being the place where individual employees and small teams store and share their work, to being home to our very largest portals, where the entire company comes together to find news and perform important common tasks.

At this scale, we continually face the challenge of ensuring that our content stored in SharePoint is secure, compliant, and easy to find and use.

It’s a big task, according to Stan Liu, senior product manager and knowledge management lead at Microsoft Digital.

“We have a complex environment,” Liu says. “With more than 300,000 users accessing the Microsoft 365 tenant across multiple global regions, a significant amount of content is being created and stored within our SharePoint environment.”

Liu is no stranger to the challenges of managing SharePoint at scale.

“We have several teams creating content and many trying to find content,” he says. “Discoverability is always at the front of our minds and making content easy to find requires time and effort in SharePoint.”

Liu’s team is focused on making content management as simple and effective as possible for Microsoft employees. SharePoint users at Microsoft Digital perform many manual tasks to keep SharePoint content secure, compliant, and easy to find and use. They apply their efforts to provide better governance over constantly increasing digital content, prevent accidental sharing, and effectively manage the content lifecycle.

At this scale, with the challenges of discoverability and manual effort clearly in focus, Liu’s team has turned to SharePoint Premium to meet these challenges and prepare Microsoft Digital for the next generation of content management and usage scenarios.

Discovering, automating, and more with SharePoint Premium

SharePoint Premium uses the power of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and the Microsoft Power Platform to bring AI, automation, and added security to content experiences, processing, and governance to SharePoint. It delivers new ways to engage with our most critical content, managing and protecting it through its lifecycle.

AI is at the root of the SharePoint Premium feature set, enhancing productivity and collaboration. AI-driven search provides personalized and relevant search results by understanding user intent and context. AI-powered insights help users discover patterns and trends in their data, enabling more informed decision-making. AI-automated workflows and content management streamline processes, while AI-infused advanced security measures ensure data protection.

SharePoint Premium includes a large set of services, including:

• Autofill columns. Autofill columns use large language models to automatically pull, condense, or create content from files in a SharePoint document library. This feature allows selected columns to store metadata without manual input, simplifying file management and data organization.
• Content assembly. Content assembly automates the creation of routine business documents, including contracts, statements of work, service agreements, consent letters, and other types of correspondence.
• Document processing. Using prebuilt, structured, unstructured, and freeform document processing models, SharePoint Premium can extract information from many document types, such as contracts, invoices, and receipts. It can also detect and extract sensitive information from documents.
• Image tagging. Image tagging helps users find and manage images in SharePoint document libraries. The image-tagging service automatically tags images with descriptive keywords using AI. These keywords are stored in a managed metadata column, making it easier to search, sort, filter, and manage the images.
• Taxonomy tagging. Taxonomy tagging helps users find and manage terms in SharePoint document libraries. SharePoint Premium uses AI to automatically tag documents with terms or term sets configured in the taxonomy store. These terms and sets are stored in a managed metadata column, making documents easier to search, sort, filter, and manage.
• Document translation. SharePoint Premium can create a translated copy of a document or video transcript in a SharePoint document library while preserving the file’s original format and structure.
• SharePoint eSignature. SharePoint eSignature facilitates the sending of electronic signature requests, ensuring documents remain within Microsoft 365 during the review and signing process. eSignature can efficiently and securely dispatch documents to be signed by individuals within or outside the organization.
• Optical character recognition. The optical character recognition (OCR) service extracts printed or handwritten text from images. SharePoint Premium automatically scans the image files, extracts the relevant text, and makes the text from the images available for search and indexing. This enables quick and accurate location of key phrases and terms.

“SharePoint Premium is really built around discovery and automation, with a huge emphasis on AI to help perform tasks efficiently at scale,” says Sean Squires, a principal product manager in the OneDrive and SharePoint Product Group. “We need that granular control and understanding of how our content and intellectual property is represented, shared, and used.”

Creating a culture of content management

There’s also a cultural element that’s critical to the team’s work.

“SharePoint Premium represents a shift in how Microsoft Digital approaches content management, not just as a new technology but as a new way of working,” Liu says. “It’s about integrating AI capabilities into daily practices to automate mundane tasks like tagging content, making it more discoverable, and keeping it up to date. This integration aims to make content management a part of daily habits and routines, ensuring content remains relevant and useful.”

Liu highlights the importance of making content management a daily habit and how AI can simplify the process. He recognizes the need for a cultural shift to incentivize active participation in content management. It’s also important to measure the impact of content contributions on others. The goal is to make content management processes, such as classifying content, a regular practice to ensure high-quality content within the enterprise.

Part of the cultural shift is in how we think about SharePoint itself. Moving from “site-centric” to “document-centric” usage of SharePoint signifies a strategic shift in how we manage SharePoint content at Microsoft Digital. Metadata and content context are critical to ensuring our content is easy to find and relevant, and we’re leaning on SharePoint Premium features to help us do that. Incentivizing active participation in content management and making it a daily habit for our employees is critical to a wider and more consistent realization of the benefits provided by SharePoint Premium across the organization.

“How do we find ways to make things easier without somebody having to do anything?” asks Ray Peer, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “That’s where we’re using the SharePoint Premium AI capabilities to help with things like automatic processing and auto-tagging. These are mundane tasks that people don’t like to do. So instead of just forcing change on the culture, we’re finding ways to make it easier for the culture to change.”

Microsoft Digital has already seen huge successes in making it easier for the culture to change with SharePoint Premium.

The Microsoft Cloud Operations & Innovation Finance team experienced several issues in accurately tracking and managing their invoices. In certain situations, the team found it difficult to find unpaid invoices or uncover missing information in invoices. These issues made it more difficult to keep track of payments and created delays in locating invoices.

To address these issues, they created a SharePoint site dedicated to invoice management for the finance team. It used the prebuilt SharePoint Premium document processing models to automatically extract important data from invoices uploaded to the document library, including PO numbers, dates, amounts, and client information. They added column metadata to track payment status and applied conditional formatting and highlighting to categorize invoices and draw attention to missing information in invoice fields.

It’s a perfect example of how an AI-driven feature like document processing in SharePoint Premium can radically transform a business process within a simple SharePoint document library. The solution reduced costs, decreased processing times, improved accuracy, and enabled better compliance for the Microsoft Cloud Operations & Innovation Finance team.

Peer reiterates that solutions like this have a way of gaining momentum in the organization.

“This solution quickly came to the attention of other finance-based departments within Microsoft,” Peer says. “Other managers wanted the same benefits and asked for the same solution. It was easy to replicate, and suddenly, those benefits were multiplied across the company.”

It’s not an isolated situation. Many other business groups have similar stories.

The Microsoft Partner Incentive Operations team sends hundreds of letters to Microsoft partners daily using a set of Microsoft Word templates. IT staff created the templates manually and updated them manually when necessary. On average, it took 75 minutes to create a template and 30 minutes to review each letter and send it to a partner organization.

To improve efficiency, they implemented a new letter generation process for partner letters based on the SharePoint Premium Content Assembly service. They created a SharePoint modern template document for the letter types they used and integrated the templates with data sourced from internal systems containing relevant information customized for each partner, by market, region and sales offer type.

The new solution created a flexible method for creating partner letters with dynamic placeholders in the document and multiple letter formats, including text, tables, and conditional sections, all driven by a self-serve UI. Letter creators could completely automate the letter creation process without any manual intervention.

The new solution created more consistent partner letter results, and the automated process saved the team more than 6,000 hours per year in manual template creation and refresh tasks, leading to a 30% increase in business agility and a decrease in time-to-market.

Integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot with AI

Microsoft 365 Copilot integrates seamlessly with SharePoint Premium to enhance its capabilities, particularly in automation and AI. The content AI and intelligent document processing built into SharePoint Premium use advanced machine learning models to classify content, organize it, extract relevant information, and automate workflows at scale. The improvements in metadata and content quality directly improve the performance and results in Copilot.

Copilot complements SharePoint Premium by using large language models to assist with document creation, Q&A, and running complex queries. It can help find specific documents based on criteria and automate tasks like translations or routing documents to appropriate teams. The integration aims to democratize the ability to configure complex machine learning models, making it easier for users to apply them to their content and achieve significant productivity gains.

The symbiotic relationship between Copilot and SharePoint Premium is particularly evident in their shared goal of automating content processing. For example, SharePoint Premium can automatically tag documents with metadata, which Copilot can then use to perform more robust queries and assist with organizing content. This collaboration represents a step towards a future where sophisticated AI-driven workflows are accessible to all users, enhancing productivity and efficiency across the organization.

It’s a vision that’s already becoming a reality at Microsoft Digital.

Looking forward

We’re anticipating a near future where AI-based content management capabilities and automation fully intersect with large language models and language understanding services to create a sophisticated combination of intelligence and automation.

“We can easily envision the capability to perform a set of complex tasks over complex content with a single prompt,” Squires says. “I might ask Microsoft 365 Copilot to find all invoices for the Fabrikam company worth more than $10,000 from 2023 and send copies of those invoices to my finance manager. SharePoint Premium is putting that future within reach at Microsoft Digital, and that’s exciting.”

Microsoft Digital will continue to invest in SharePoint Premium capabilities across the organization and work with the product group as Customer Zero, growing SharePoint Premium features to push the boundaries of what’s capable with AI-powered content management.

Here are a few takeaways that can help you get started with SharePoint Premium in your organization:

• Explore the different Content AI services that SharePoint Premium offers, such as autofill columns, content assembly, document processing, image tagging, taxonomy tagging, document translation, eSignature, and optical character recognition.
• Identify the business processes and scenarios in your organization that could benefit from AI-driven content management and automation, such as invoice tracking, partner or customer correspondence, document creation, and content discovery.
• Learn how to configure and use SharePoint Premium features in your SharePoint document libraries, such as creating and applying metadata columns, setting up content assembly templates, enabling document processing models, and using image and taxonomy tagging.
• Integrate Microsoft 365 Copilot with SharePoint Premium to enhance your content experiences and workflows, such as querying for specific documents, translating content, routing documents to appropriate teams, and creating documents with natural language prompts.

Get started with Microsoft SharePoint Premium today.

New to Microsoft 365 Copilot? Try it out.

• Learn how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot with the help of—you guessed it—Copilot.
• Check out how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Microsoft moves its main employee portal to latest version of SharePoint – Inside Track Blog.

• 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 Reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint Premium appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft began deploying the new Microsoft Edge browser to its 151,000 employees this week, a critical step in the company’s worldwide rollout of the Chromium-based browser.

“Microsoft’s internal use of the new Edge has been pivotal for us,” says Steve Rugh, a principal program manager lead in the Microsoft Edge product group. He thanked the 100,000 employees who used pre-release versions of the browser, saying, “Their feedback helped us shape the product.”

Rugh called out his team’s direct partnership with Microsoft Digital. The IT engineering organization is currently deploying the new browser across the company, and the team that deployed the beta to several teams over the past year for scenario validation and testing.

“Microsoft gives us an excellent way to test how enterprise-ready we are,” he says.

“Microsoft gives us an excellent way to test how enterprise-ready we are,” he says. “Leveraging Microsoft early and often has helped us find and fix gaps—and it doesn’t hurt that, because they are down the hallway or in the building across the street, they are very easy to talk to and partner with.”

Herman Forrest, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital, says that employees have been eager to use the new Microsoft Edge, both in preview channels and its final form.

“When you have a great product—when you a have clear use case, great examples, proof points on why it’s better than the legacy version of Microsoft Edge—then you don’t have to convince people to use it,” says Forrest, who is project-managing Microsoft’s internal deployment of the new Microsoft Edge. “People have been volunteering to try the new Edge on their own—that’s how we got more than 100,000 employees to try the most recent version of the beta.”

Just like it did with the beta, Microsoft Digital will deploy Microsoft Edge in waves, starting with an inner ring of early adopters who, through telemetry, and qualitive and quantitative research, ensure that everything is working correctly.

“We’ll do a phased deployment, scaling up to 15,000 employees,” Forrest says. At that point, the team also will make sure that major company portals like Human Resources, the company’s internal home page, and other key internal sites are working as expected. “We want to make sure everything is compatible and that all features are working correctly.”

Once confirmed, the browser will be deployed to the rest of the company in waves of 20,000 to 40,000 employees. That work will likely stretch into April.

“Doing this in a phased manner allows our communications team to send out targeted communications,” says Daniel Manalo, the Microsoft Digital senior service engineer in charge of the technical deployment of Microsoft Edge. “That way we minimize surprising people when the installation starts.”

Employees who have put Microsoft Edge through its paces have done so because they want to help and because they want to try it out, says John Philpott, a Microsoft Digital senior service engineer working on the internal deployment.

“We want people to choose Edge because they like the experience,” he says.

Philpott’s team will track how employees react and will address any issues or concerns they have. “So far everything has been really positive,” he says.

Employees who were on the beta consistently scored Microsoft Edge in the 150 to 160 Net User Satisfaction (NSAT) range out of a maximum of 200, and Philpott expects similar results when it’s broadly deployed. “That’s a huge improvement over the 70 to 80 that the old Edge used to fight for,” he says.

[Learn more about how Microsoft has made the search experience it offers employees more intelligent and personalized. Check out how Microsoft has embraced Windows as a service internally.]

Exploring the new Microsoft Edge

Philpott is among the early users who are enjoying the new browser’s features and capabilities.

“The thing I like the most is that they’ve nailed proper syncing,” Philpott says. “Not only do my favorites, passwords, and things like that travel with me from device to device, but they also now allow me to switch from a work profile to a personal profile. I used to have to open a different browser every time I wanted to look at my personal sites—now I don’t have to have multiple browsers.”

It also includes Internet Explorer mode (IE mode), a feature designed for organizations that have older websites and line-of-business applications that run only on Internet Explorer 11.

“Now, when you open one of those applications, the link will open in IE mode right in Edge,” Philpott says of a mode that needs to be set up by IT admins during deployment. “Internet Explorer won’t open on its own anymore. Edge will be your home for the web no matter what you use it for.”

Forrest says that IE mode is designed to simplify the experience of moving back and forth between legacy sites and the current experience.

“One of my favorite features in the new Microsoft Edge is how well IE mode combines this modern rendering engine and compatibility with legacy Internet Explorer sites,” he says.

Employees have also enjoyed improvements to Microsoft Search in Bing.

“You can search both the intranet and the internet at the same time,” Forrest says. “Edge will serve you your internal and external results in one view. That’s a powerful, powerful experience.”

Forrest also spotlighted new privacy-enhancing features in the new Microsoft Edge, including Tracking prevention options and a new InPrivate search with Microsoft Bing when browsing in InPrivate.

“The fact that you’re an employee doesn’t mean we can get data on you,” he says. “Just like our customers, Edge protects your privacy.”

Tools for deploying Microsoft Edge

Rugh says there’s a lot to like in the new browser for the IT admins who plan to deploy it.

The company’s decision to build on the Chromium open-source engine means that far more websites will now work on Microsoft Edge, he says.

“This is where users are and this is where web developers are,” Rugh says. “Rather than find yet another way to fracture the web with yet another browser, we decided to build on and improve upon the Chromium open-source project that most people and developers are using.”

Rugh says helping to get everyone on one browser platform is good for everyone, including Microsoft.

“Now it’s easier to use our browser,” he says. “The new Microsoft Edge is still a front door to Microsoft and now it will be easier for more people to walk through that door.”

With Microsoft Edge, the company has layered many features and protections on top of that open-source platform, creating a browser with the best of all worlds.

“It has best-in-class compatibility with extensions and web sites,” Rugh says. “It has great support for the latest rendering capabilities and modern web applications, and it has powerful developer tools that work across all supported platforms.”

IT admins can use features that Microsoft built into Microsoft Edge on top of the Chromium open-source platform, including Application Guard and SmartScreen for enhancing browser security. Application Guard opens Microsoft Edge in a separate container to protect intruders from trying to access the device or operating system, and SmartScreen helps to protect against malware and phishing.

And unlike with the legacy version of Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, updates to the new browser can be deployed when the admin wants. They no longer have to wait on the Windows Update cadence.

“We have a new version of the browser ship roughly every six weeks and we make security updates as needed,” Rugh says. “Now we can move as fast as needed to make sure we keep Edge secure and working.”

The fact that reboots are not needed when a new version gets rolled out got a thumbs-up from employees, Microsoft Digital’s Philpott says.

“The updates happened so seamlessly in the background during the beta that often times the only way employees knew that a new version had been loaded onto their machine was because a ‘what’s new’ tile would pop up in their browser,” he says.

Those kinds of improvements are changing the way Microsoft employees feel about the company’s Microsoft Edge.

“I really like the new browser,” Philpott says. “I use it on my home machine, which I think says a lot. The enterprise customer is important, but what people use at school and at home ends up being what they use at work.”

Interested in the new Microsoft Edge for your organization? Download offline installers and pilot it today.

• Read this follow up story on the completion of Microsoft’s internal roll out of the new Microsoft Edge browser. 
• Learn more about how Microsoft has made the search experience it offers employees more intelligent and personalized.
• Check out how Microsoft has embraced Windows as a service internally.

The post Rolling out Microsoft Edge browser across Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enabling optimal search

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

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

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

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

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

Business impact of search

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

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

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

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

Daily activities

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

Monthly activities

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

Quarterly activities

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

Where to start

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

Benefits of search admin activity.

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

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

Other suggestions follow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steps to take every day

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

Process bookmark requests

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

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

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

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

Process support requests

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

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

Review new sites

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

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

Perform search health check

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

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

Monitor connections

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

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

Steps to take monthly

Review search log

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

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

Fix broken links

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update search help site

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

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

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

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

Reload acronyms

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

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

Review recurring events

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

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

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

Steps to take quarterly

Tune bookmarks

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

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

When telemetry allows, search admin wants to:

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

Reload locations

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

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

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

Review friendly URLs

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

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

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

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

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

The essential communication fabric that enables this cross-company participation across vibrant and diverse communities is powered by Microsoft Viva Engage.

Recently, we positioned our employees and staff for the next wave of collaboration by shifting Viva Engage to Native Mode, strengthening our ties across Microsoft 365 and our internal social network.

Migrating to Native Mode aligns Microsoft Viva Engage with Microsoft 365 groups and improves how we use it to collaborate and communicate via Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft SharePoint. Additionally, having our internal social network in Native Mode enables our IT professionals to manage it with processes and management that were established for Microsoft 365.

The move to native mode was led by our team Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), the engineering organization at Microsoft that builds and manages the products, processes, and services that our company runs on.

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxQ5kfKQE, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Why it was time to implement Native Mode

Microsoft Viva Engage joined the Microsoft family of products in 2012. Since then, the internal social networking service has experienced significant and organic growth, becoming a wellspring for knowledge-sharing across the company. Our employees and partners have long relied on Viva Engage to communicate. At the start of our work-from-home period, 110,000 users turned to Viva Engage to connect and collaborate with colleagues. Even prior to that, our employees and third-party guests have leaned heavily on the platform to communicate initiatives, changes, and host stimulating and asynchronous conversations on critical topics. As the social network grew, it became clear that it was necessary to remove some outdated or irrelevant material for the health and future development of the network.

Migrating to Native Mode is the only way to fully align the back end of Microsoft Viva Engage to the rest of the Microsoft suite of products, including Microsoft Azure Active Directory. Beyond integration, Native Mode permits us to manage all Viva Engage communities with the same policies and practices implemented across Microsoft 365. The integrated infrastructure of Native Mode enables all files and conversations to be searchable and shareable through common methods. Additionally, moving to Native Mode allowed us to leverage Microsoft Azure B2B guest models, adopting unified and familiar document, group, and app sharing models for partners and customers.

The strong identity management introduced in Native Mode simplifies oversight, adding controls to manage guest identities and appropriate guest access to the service. In addition to the Microsoft Azure B2B guest capabilities, Microsoft 365 rules and policies can now be applied to Microsoft Viva Engage communities.

With new policies promoting safe practices and rules removing unused content, Microsoft Viva Engage in Native Mode empowers a vibrant network to continue supporting our culture of innovation and inclusion.

Planning and preparing for migration

Moving from classic Microsoft Viva Engage to Native Mode could be as simple a process as flipping a few switches and adjusting some settings. To make the transition smooth, the Viva Engage engineering team has developed an automated wizard for Viva Engage, the Native Mode Alignment Tool, to help migrate communities of fewer than 50,000 users. For larger enterprises, including us here at Microsoft, migrating to Native Mode requires a closely monitored approach guided by an engineer.

Native Mode alignment

Native Mode alignment guides the processes of migrating Microsoft Viva Engage to Native Mode. This process inventories existing members, communities, and files, enabling decisions about how to handle changes that might occur during transition. The process also monitors the progress of proactive changes, limiting the number of surprises encountered during the migration to Native Mode.

The Native Mode Alignment Tool generates the reports an administrator needs to initiate the Native Mode process when ready.

The switch to Native Mode is either automated, with the Native Mode Alignment Tool, or engineer driven. Customers can initiate migration themselves through our alignment tool, or be automatically migrated through our Microsoft Viva Engage-initiated pipeline. Users that are set-up for automatic migration receive advance notice through our Microsoft 365 message center. The volume of information in our Viva Engage network is significantly higher than a majority of other customers. As such, we worked with the Viva Engage engineering team to successfully migrate to Native Mode with minimal disruption.

Our approach included several important phases.

Clean house

Readying for Native Mode revealed that we had several thousand unused groups and Microsoft Viva Engage accounts that accrued since the service’s introduction. As our MDEE team worked through our migration strategy and introduced automated lifecycle controls, abandoned groups were culled from the network and safekeeping strategies were implemented to help owners prepare for Native Mode. Cleaning up Viva Engage occurred throughout the entire migration, helping to prune the environment of unnecessary material and easing the transition.

1. Eliminate groups that are no longer needed. Previously, duplicate, unused, and old Microsoft Viva Engage groups stayed around in perpetuity. Removing superfluous items reduced the number of groups we had to monitor during migration.
2. Address groups that fail governance. To comply with our standards, our administrators and owners of noncompliant groups were required to take action lest their groups be deleted. This effort helped remove groups that weren’t needed.
3. Ensure clear ownership. Dubbed the “FTE + 1” rule, groups who fell short of the two owner, one FTE threshold were given the opportunity to promote a new owner or agree that the community would be deleted. If no action was taken, the group would be deleted through automation. In some circumstances, users had been appointed group owner due to team changes and may have been unaware of their ownership status. When ownership was unclear, we consulted with group members on the steps needed to bring the group into compliance.

Cleaning house properly decreases the number of unused and noncompliant groups within social networks, reducing the number of groups that must be migrated. Furthermore, as old and outdated groups are removed from the ranks, users can better discover current resources and information.

Assess the current state of the Microsoft Viva Engage network

Before moving into Native Mode, we carefully examined the existing network. This meant digging into specifics about how classic Viva Engage communities were being used.

1. Connected versus classic. How many communities were currently connected to Microsoft 365 prior to moving to Native Mode? The number of classic Microsoft Viva Engage groups within a network determined the scale of migration required.
2. Members and guests. Collaboration in Microsoft Viva Engage is at its best when internal and guest users can work together. Understanding the volume of guest access and identifying groups with guests in classic Viva Engage is a necessary step for transitioning those guests into new identities provided by Microsoft Azure B2B. In Native Mode, guests rely on Microsoft Azure B2B to access the network.
3. Owners.To meet our internal compliance standards, all Microsoft 365 groups require two owners, one of which must be an FTE. Being able to identify owners and noncompliant groups allows service engineers to identify which groups require changes to be compliant in Native Mode. In addition to fulfilling compliance requirements, providing early information to group owners allowed us to prepare members for changes related to migration to Microsoft 365 and Native Mode.
4. Unlisted and secret groups. Classic Microsoft Viva Engage enabled owners to indicate that private groups be unlisted in the groups directory and undiscoverable in Viva Engage search. At Microsoft, most of these groups were created for testing, but some contained confidential information. In the transition to Native Mode, these groups needed to be converted to private groups, which still restricts access to members of the community, but enables the group name, description, and avatar image to appear in the community directory and Microsoft 365 search indexes.
   Identifying unlisted and secret groups allowed us to develop an appropriate masking strategy and communicate with owners early.

Pre-work related to evaluating and understanding the Microsoft Viva Engage environment is critical to a successful migration. The preceding elements will all be affected during the transition into Native Mode, and knowing what will be affected reduces the potential for surprises or disruption.

Proactively address gap cases

Although the majority of classic Microsoft Viva Engage groups connect to Microsoft 365 without complication, several gap cases exist that require early and proactive involvement. To avoid disruption, we developed specific strategies to address these gap cases.

1. Safely mask unlisted and secret groups. Native Mode still supports private groups, but previously unlisted groups will show up in search results. Unlisted groups from classic Microsoft Viva Engage become private groups that present content only to members, but the name, avatar image, and description may be visible to anyone in searches.
   To protect confidentiality, unlisted or secret groups were re-titled, assigned a generic avatar image, and given new descriptions to avoid sensitive information appearing in public searches.
   After migrating, owners of affected groups were prompted to edit the group title and meet classification requirements. If these groups were not re-titled after migration, we assumed the group was abandoned and removed it.
2. Encourage users to store file attachments in Microsoft Viva Engage private messages. Private messages exist in both classic Viva Engage and Native Mode networks. Although you can store files in groups in Microsoft SharePoint, files in private messages don’t have an associated group. As a result, any necessary files must be downloaded prior to the transition to Native Mode.
   To avoid users losing files saved in private messages, we developed communications to encourage users to download their files and back them up elsewhere. Users were asked to acknowledge completion of this task so that we could gauge the proportion of users who may not have acted. If necessary, we planned to engage directly with users having a large volume of files stored in private messages—a step that proved unnecessary due to high response rates.
3. Prepare guests in external groups to adopt the Microsoft Azure B2B guest model. Because the guest model was changing and guest users might not have access to communities for up to one day, communications were provided for group owners and members to align expectations for Native Mode. This included detailed information as to what would change, confirmation that a Microsoft Viva Engage group was still active and needed, and prepared communications to share with guests. Final announcements went to all members, including guests, with supporting information that would be available even if access to a community was interrupted.

These proactive steps exist to reduce a disruption of service for Microsoft Viva Engage users. By predicting and responding to gaps, we were able to engage with groups and owners early, preventing a loss of access. When needed, our Customer Success Account Managers are able to submit requests via our FastTrack portal for additional migration support.

Ease the shift for critical and large communities

We were always aware of the potential impact a migration might have on large and critical Yammer groups. To avoid confusion related to the changes, additional communication was established with groups and owners of key communities.

1. Shift communities that need Microsoft 365 features. Several features, including the ability to host live events, host files in Microsoft SharePoint, and enable a consistent Microsoft 365 user experience, were only available in connected communities. Ensuring key community owners understood the change and would experience no loss in functionality required direct communication by us.
2. Shift communities with large membership numbers. Our larger Yammer groups, those with 5,000 members or more, also required direct engagement and communication in order to avoid disruption. Direct one-on-one interaction with community leaders also proved to be helpful for readying our bigger communities.

By engaging early and often, we were able to consult with groups and owners regarding the new features and benefits of Native Mode, discuss action steps required to ease the migration, and convey milestones.

Communications

Early on, our communications professionals scheduled a series of messages to go out to users informing them of the changes. A major part of our migration plan was to provide high-level information to everyone, then rely heavily on regular communication with group owners for targeted actions. Project managers directly engaged with group owners from larger and critical communities to prepare them for the change. This steady stream of communication not only helped group owners ready for migration, it also amplified messages across Microsoft Viva Engage.

We communicated directly through emails, via messages posted into groups, and through generalized announcements posted in all-company environments, including Microsoft Viva Engage and Microsoft 365 groups. Emails were utilized when direct action was called for, whereas general messages were posted throughout Viva Engage communities. In utilizing this strategy, we were able to sequence and map out a successful messaging campaign.

1. Provide context. Microsoft Viva Engage capabilities have evolved over time, but to enable fundamental changes that take advantage of Microsoft 365 capabilities, a transition into Native Mode became a necessity. Moving to Native Mode is a one-time event, after which every new community is immediately connected in Microsoft 365. Giving users this context helps them understand the value of migration.
   At a user and group owner level, it was important for us to convey action and consequence. Giving this kind of context allowed us to prevent any loss of user files, messages, or groups. This also meant informing Microsoft Viva Engage users of groups and files they owned in the network so that they might take action.
2. Seize the opportunity. Conveying the benefits of Native Mode to members of our Microsoft Viva Engage communities was a top priority. Integration with Microsoft 365 did more than strengthen compliance controls, it also unlocked several features, including live event, guest controls, and eDiscovery, that users had long been asking for. These changes closely aligned to our technology and cultural goals. Communicating what was possible in Native Mode got users excited for the change, creating buy-in.
3. Account for overlapping audiences in your communications plan. While mapping out a communications calendar, we recognized that individuals might be both a member and an owner of several categories of Microsoft Viva Engage groups. To avoid bombarding our users with repetitive or unnecessary information, comprehensive communications were delivered broadly to reduce the number of messages and potential confusion.
4. Record audience actions and acknowledgements. Several communications included calls to update Microsoft Viva Engage communities and acknowledge completed actions. If response rates were low, we were able to prepare further mitigating steps to avoid disruption during the transition.

Given the complexity and scale of the project, setting out a strong pattern of communication eased the transition to Native Mode. After the migration was underway, we published web pages and blogs to further facilitate the communication with users, group owners, and stakeholders during the change.

Managing the shift to Native Mode

Due to the size of our Microsoft Viva Engage environment, initiating Native Mode required coordination to manage the volume of accounts, thousands of Microsoft 365 groups, and millions of files. Additionally, the age of the network became a factor because variations found in older metadata made it more complex to migrate from classic into Native Mode.

To initiate Native Mode and minimize the impact on users, we developed a coordinated plan for managing the migration. This multi-day process sequenced priorities and team involvement to create a clear approach with engineers, project management, communications, and tenant administrators. Several processes took an extended period of time to run, but in the end, we were able to connect all users, files, and groups to Native Mode.

1. Coordinate a game plan. Map out timing between all stakeholders, including engineers and network administrators who will be logging and resolving any snags encountered during the migration. For a Microsoft Viva Engage network the size of ours, initiating Native Mode required several weeks of work, with guest users experiencing a day of disrupted service. Having a coordinated plan reduced the risk of extended outages.
2. Share with dependent teams. Engaging with dependent teams, like support and listening teams, including tenant administrators, sets expectations during the migration. These updates should include a clear schedule of events and progress as migration processes run. Aligning expectations and sharing timing and progress updates reduces frustrations, improves communications, and leverages the support of dependent teams.
3. Manage from a scripted set of actions. The Native Mode Alignment Tool can’t service a network of our size and scope, but it could inform management of our migration. Adhering to an order of operations consistent with the Native Mode alignment process optimizes the transition and minimizes a chance of downtime. This step ensured that the right players were involved, the right information was available, timing could be estimated, and contingency plans could be put into place.

Anticipating elevated support

Having an escalation plan in place was critical for us. During our migration to Native Mode, our team recognized several potential drivers for increased support related to the new Microsoft Viva Engage environment.

1. With change comes learning and uncertainty. We understood that users and group owners would need time to acclimate to community governance for Microsoft Viva Engage. We also recognized a need for support and administrative teams to familiarize themselves with new processes as well. By planning for a certain degree of uncertainty and learning curve, we were able to set expectations.
2. Expect new types of issues. New workflows uncover new issues. Actively logging and responding to errors allowed us to efficiently focus engineer and support energies.
3. Cleanup might carry unexpected consequences. During the cleanup phase, we saw the number of groups within Microsoft move from 40,000 to around 21,000. Although this is a significant decrease in volume, it actually represents a healthier environment consisting of active communities. Though aggregate metrics may change, the groups being removed were abandoned or noncompliant.
   A similar trend was visible within group membership numbers. Users with a “pending” status—often email addresses mentioned in a community but not representing users who visited—are not preserved during migration. As such, some communities witnessed an apparent reduction in membership numbers when pending users disappeared.

Initiating Native Mode for Microsoft Viva Engage was a big step for us. We understood the impact it would have on users, both in terms of benefits and possible disruptions. Now that a Native Mode Viva Engage environment is established, our company-wide social network can reap the benefits of a full Microsoft 365 integration.

1. Group management. New compliance features unlocked in Microsoft Viva Engage through Microsoft 365 means that we can establish governance consistently across all groups, instead of individually.
2. Content search and eDiscovery. Our user files are now saved in Microsoft SharePoint instead of Microsoft Viva Engage. This makes it easier for users to quickly find items using enterprise search and Microsoft graph signals. This allows our compliance measures to scale with the network. Additionally, Microsoft 365’s eDiscovery features now spans all of our Microsoft Viva Engage content.
3. Enhanced capabilities. In addition to being able to host live events, we now manage Microsoft Viva Engage’s guest access through Microsoft Azure B2B. This new approach means our guest users can access Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage with the same identity.
4. Consistent experience. In Native Mode, Viva Engage employs predictable Microsoft 365 features our users expect. Instead of unique workflows, Microsoft Viva Engage enables file viewing, editing, and sharing consistent to other Microsoft environments.

• Check out this overview of Native Mode.
• Explore Yammer Native Mode: step-by-step guide.
• Read more about configuring your Yammer network for Native Mode for Microsoft 365.
• Discover the future of Group Member Management: How Microsoft is leading the way with automation.

The post Migrating Microsoft Viva Engage to Native Mode unlocks the benefits of Microsoft 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Search is part of our everyday life. It’s useful—we all know that—but how can you quantify that impact?

That was the challenge faced by Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital. “There’s an obvious value, we can see that by the existence of Bing,” Willingham says. “But how do you put it in numbers?”

Lots of searches happen in a company, but when asked to demonstrate the business impact as part of justifying more investment, Willingham had an epiphany. He could use telemetry to make the argument for him.

Click the image to learn how Microsoft is using Microsoft Search internally to dramatically improve the finding experience for company employees.

Microsoft Search is unifying search for Microsoft 365 customers across Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 apps on Windows, Microsoft OneDrive for Business, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Bing. More specifically, the Microsoft Search team strives to bring complete, company-wide results to each individual, no matter where they’re searching from. No longer should they need to search in separate products to ensure that they search all possible content.

Internally at Microsoft, this shift is proving to be very powerful.

“Employees no longer need to change platforms to get the results they’re looking for,” Willingham says. “They do a single search and get all the results they need.”

Within the company, Microsoft Digital manages the internal deployment of search across the company. “The purpose of active search administration is to deliver the most complete search results, with good relevancy and good quality,” Willingham says. “These improvements to search are helping us do that.”

One crucial way that Willingham and his team help deliver better search results is through corporate bookmarks that allow internal teams like Corporate Communications and Human Resources to select the top results employees get when they search specific sets of keywords.

These bookmarks aren’t the kind used to save your favorite sites—they’re curated results that search administrators can use to point people to content located someplace that can’t be indexed. They highlight authoritative sources of content, and ensure popular content is accessible.

Bookmarks boost employee productivity because they get employees the right results very quickly.

Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital

And they’re fast.

“Bookmarks boost employee productivity because they get employees the right results very quickly,” Willingham says.

The business value of search

Including telemetry in the overall improvements to internal corporate searching—a feature built into Microsoft Enterprise SharePoint—allowed Willingham and his team to measure how much time employees spend on a search.

And what story is the data telling?

“We found that bookmarks net a direct benefit of 6,250 hours a month and 17,160 hours in indirect benefits,” Willingham says. “Combined, 23,410 hours of benefits are being realized each month.”

How did Willingham come to these numbers?

“Forty-five percent of all searches click on a bookmark,” Willingham says. That percentage is across the 1.6 million monthly searches that take place internally at Microsoft within Microsoft Bing and Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Search.

Scaled to an enterprise level, the business value of bookmarks quickly became apparent.

“Conservatively, our basic measurement of search success was yielding results of 60 seconds per search using a bookmark versus an average of 115 seconds across all searches,” Willingham says. “That’s one whole minute of productivity re-captured for every bookmark-backed search.”

Multiplied across Microsoft’s population and search usage, that one minute of search time netted 6,250 hours a month in productivity. But it’s not just time gained from quick search results, it’s also about getting the right answers.

There’s a measurement based on telemetry of whether a search succeeded or failed to find useful content. Using that metric, Willingham found that a person who uses a bookmark appears to be successful 98 percent of the time. By contrast, searches without a bookmark average 72 percent for the same calculation.

“The absolute calculation [of search success] is kind of meaningless; what’s important is that it moved by a significant margin,” Willingham says. “It suggests that with bookmarks, more people find the content they need faster.”

In direct benefits, you’re gaining 6,000 hours at the cost of 300. When you include indirect, you can triple that. The return on investment is 2,000 percent, and that’s using conservative estimates.

Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital

Faster is a direct productivity gain. Getting the right content to the right person at the right time is an indirect benefit. But the biggest insight is that delivering these benefits only requires investing less than 300 hours per month, spread across several staff.

“In direct benefits, you’re gaining 6,000 hours at the cost of 300. When you include indirect, you can triple that,” Willingham says. “The return on investment is 2,000 percent, and that’s using conservative estimates.”

How Microsoft uses bookmarks

With new practices in hand and telemetry to chart impact, Willingham and his team set out to optimize using bookmarks in search.

“Over the course of three years, we took the volume of bookmarks from around 1,100 to a peak of 1,800,” he says. “We’re currently sitting at around 1,200.”

Bookmarks were already being used before Microsoft Search was rolled out.

“We didn’t do anything revolutionary, we just opened up the guidelines so that more bookmarks could be added when appropriate,” Willingham says. “We then tuned them based on actual usage so that only those being used were kept.”

The technology for bookmarks had previously been part of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive, made visible in the employee portal for Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise, MSW. Bookmarks had a set of configuration rules and standards for what could and couldn’t be a bookmark, but that’s it.

Librarians from the Microsoft Library Services team create and manage the company’s search bookmarks.

“It’s a multifaceted role,” says Beck Keller, also a member of the Microsoft Digital Enterprise Search team. “My responsibilities as a librarian at the Microsoft Library are far broader—bookmarks are just a small part of my job. This doesn’t take up my entire work week.”

What does she do for search administration?

Every month, Keller pulls search query metrics and analyzes them for areas of interest that currently lack a bookmark or good naturalized results. From this analysis, Keller can update the enterprise bookmarks across Microsoft.

“Sometimes this means removing or changing bookmarks that don’t currently meet our standards,” Keller says. “I also review proposed bookmarks and offer guidance to Microsoft teams looking to create bookmarks for their own sites, outside of Enterprise Search.”

This is the administrative work Willingham is talking about—bookmarks can be added, removed, or updated with ease. But the impact can be bigger than recapturing lost productivity.

“A year ago, there were no searches for COVID-19,” Willingham says. “We now get hundreds and thousands of searches a month. We went from zero to around 200 [between October and February]. There was no way to surface relevant results about COVID-19 because there were so few of them.”

But this was the trait the administrative search team was looking for—how to get better and proactive insights on Microsoft Search. Informed by current events, the team sought to anticipate which results users would be looking for.

“We asked if there should be a bookmark for the right COVID-19 link,” Keller says.

Willingham and Keller reached out to Corporate Communications about where to direct Microsoft users searching for information on COVID-19. That team was putting together a landing page for employees dedicated to content on the topic, including a FAQ. The bookmark was quickly built and deployed.

This was February 2020.

“The next month, the volume of searches for COVID-19 went up 40-fold,” Willingham says. “Maybe users would have found the info on their own, but as search volume was growing, 8,000 times a month they would nearly always find what they were looking for quickly, thanks to the bookmark.”

That’s the main goal of a search administrator.

Bright future for bookmarks

So, what’s next for Microsoft Search and bookmarks?

“More telemetry,” Willingham says. “The custom telemetry that we created is something any customer can do. It’s a capability within SharePoint.”

Having even more metrics will also help to further quantify Willingham’s findings.

“We erred on the low side for our productivity numbers, but it shows what’s possible for a medium or large company.”

Both Willingham and Keller are excited to see others adopt bookmarks as a way of improving Microsoft Search.

“Bookmarks are easy to put in,” Keller says. “The owner of the content tells us what the URL is, and some basic info such as a preliminary title and description. We figure out the appropriate keywords, update the basic info where needed, and then say ‘Go.’”

It all adds up to a better experience for employees when they need to go looking for something.

“The same tools we use to optimize bookmarks are available to everyone,” Willingham says. “That’s why they’re so useful for productivity. When combined with telemetry, you can really gain some unexpected insights into the productivity of your organization.”

• Read this guide on how to create and manage bookmarks at your company.
• Getting to ‘search completeness’ internally at Microsoft.

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

The post Internal search bookmarks boost productivity at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Editor’s note: This blog post has been updated to reflect how improvements in SharePoint in Microsoft 365 are enabling Microsoft to share news about COVID-19 and remote working with its employees in ways that were previously not possible.

Moving MSW, Microsoft’s internal news and information portal, to the latest version of SharePoint in Microsoft 365 is aiding the company as it provides COVID-19 guidance to its employees.

“We pretty dramatically rearranged our home page in a matter of hours to better be able to represent to employees our response to COVID-19,” Jaffe says. “This would have been impossible in the old SharePoint environment. It’s pretty amazing to have a tool flexible enough to allow us to make this kind of change this quickly.”

Microsoft finished moving MSW to SharePoint in Microsoft 365 in January, opening a number of new doors to the people who manage a website that is Microsoft’s front door for its employees.

“MSW is an out-of-the-box SharePoint home site for the entire organization,” Jaffe says. “Our vision is that it’s tailored to all of our employees based on where they work and who they work with, and is accessible on any device, anywhere.”

The changeover of the Microsoft home page to the most current version of SharePoint is a pivotal milestone on the company’s journey to migrate nearly 400,000 sites and portals to the web-based collaborative platform, moving from the classic publishing version of SharePoint to the latest “intelligent intranet” functionality.

That new functionality is enabling MSW to use SharePoint home-site technology to give employees a dynamic, personalized, and mobile experience—one that can change easily when the need arises.

On Monday, March 24th, Jaffe’s team decided that MSW’s home page needed to be reorganized to better show the content that Microsoft has available to employees on COVID-19 and on working remotely. In just hours, his team had redesigned the entire home page, providing employees with key COVID-19 resources, internal updates, and top news.

The move from then to now

Microsoft has moved 86 percent of its SharePoint team sites (332,446 sites and counting) and 76 percent of its SharePoint publishing portals (about 15,000 so far), but it has been slower to migrate its handful of larger-scale internal portals like MSW (short for Microsoft Web).

The company has reached a tipping point.

“We’re well on our way to finishing a migration that will allow us to significantly improve the end-to-end experience we offer our employees,” says Sam Crewdson, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience.

This means that MSW is now accessible and mobile responsive by default. It also means that the number of customizations needed to manage the home page has been reduced from 13 to only 3.

“The fact that 86 percent of our sites are on the most current version of SharePoint in Microsoft 365 reflects a leap forward,” Crewdson says.

The Microsoft Employee Communications Team delayed moving the MSW home page to the new experience so that it could take advantage of search improvements, audience selectivity, and recently added SharePoint home-site capabilities. The vast majority of MSW’s pages—more than 99 percent—were moved to the most updated version of SharePoint one year ago.

“The fact that MSW has now made the move clears the path for legal, human resources, and other major portals to follow,” says Crewdson, whose team partnered with the Employee Communications Team to move the portal to the updated design. “Some of our big portals have already migrated.”

[Learn how Microsoft Digital Employee Experience supports the company’s use of SharePoint.]
For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GgmKP84cOE, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Making MSW feel more like home

The new site, which 200,000 Microsoft employees, vendors, and partners call home, offers a more personalized experience while giving Jaffe and the Employee Communications Team a new set of tools to better communicate with employees and to assert their preferred branding look and feel.

“It’s about helping employees find information that’s relevant to them, to help them complete the tasks they want to complete,” Jaffe says. “Hopefully, that allows them to become more engaged and to spend less time searching.”

In the past, MSW tended to publish content that was Redmond-centric, meaning it was focused on the stories coming out of company headquarters.

“If you didn’t fit the profile of working in Redmond, you didn’t really feel like you were part of the company that was showing up on the pages of MSW,” Jaffe says.

That prompted company divisions and regional offices across the globe to create their own smaller portals that they used to share their local news and information with their people.

“We will use the updated MSW to unravel that trend,” Jaffe says. “We want teams from India, Australia, Silicon Valley, and everywhere else to localize the content that shows up on MSW for the people who work in their regions. We think of it as taking a One Microsoft approach to the intranet.”

Getting Microsoft’s large portals onto the latest feature set of SharePoint is a win for the product group, says DC Padur, a principal product manager in SharePoint.

“Having Microsoft launch this is a big deal, because it’s one of the biggest users of SharePoint in the world,” says Padur, who points out that his team learns a lot from how the company uses the product. “Customers ask, ‘How are you using it?’ They say, ‘Understanding how you use it will help me to understand how it would work for me.’”

Padur says being a SharePoint showcase works only if MSW is using the most current version of the product, which is now the case.

“We’re constantly adapting SharePoint,” he says. “Now our own IT team can adapt to new experiences as they come out and give us feedback that we can use for fine tuning to scale what works out to the entire world.”

New features pivotal in making MSW home page for all

When MSW debuted as the company’s home page in 1996, it was the definitive place where employees went to find information and do what they needed to do. Since then, employees get additional information that is specific to them, whether it be news, how to sign up for benefits in their home country, or the menu at their local café—all from numerous sources and accessible across various applications.

“We’ve had a home page with really limited audience customization,” Jaffe says. “We wanted to move to the point where we felt like we had a personalized home page built just for you. To do that, we needed to move from limited targeting to much finer-grained targeting.”

This means that customized content is aggregated for the user on a more central location based on their activities with content and other people throughout the company. Therefore, communication managers from particular parts of the company can now program content on MSW that will be seen by only the employees in their divisions. For example, the company’s sales team is now using MSW’s audience targeting feature to share guidance with sellers on how to support their customers and partners as they deal with COVID-19.

“Our new SharePoint home site allows that kind of customization,” Crewdson says. “Audience targeting has been democratized. Anyone can do it—it’s very easy.”

How does it work?

The MSW content team can push out content that’s relevant to everyone, but local content managers can change and adjust the content that shows up in their region or to employees in their particular division (what Xbox employees see will be different from that viewed by employees in the Office group). When it launches fully, local teams will be able to feed their local content into their version of MSW, eliminating the need for them to operate their own, separate portal.

Some news will be required reading for everyone, like announcements from senior leadership or broader company meetings; items like those will automatically be programmed to be seen by all. Also, by default, information like café menus and bus schedules will show only what’s available in an individual employee’s city or office—if you’re an employee in New York City, you won’t see shuttle options for Redmond.

Empowering the company to deliver relevant information to its employees is only half of it. The SharePoint news feature offers a personalized news feed in places like the SharePoint start page and the SharePoint mobile app. When a user follows a site, for example, news from that site is shown in their feed.

“In this way SharePoint can act as a news aggregator, centralizing the news from across all the sites that are important to you,” Crewdson says. “We believe, as the news features continue to be adopted, we’re going to have more informed users. People are more productive when they’re engaged.”

A communications manager in Microsoft Australia or the company’s regional office in Los Angeles would sign in to MSW, take a look at the feed coming in from headquarters in Redmond and add any local, role-related, or organizational content that they want to distribute for the employees who they’re trying to reach. On their end, it’s as easy as adding a headline, image, and description and then adding a group tag for each news item.

SharePoint value out-of-the-box

SharePoint offers much more than targeting content, Crewdson says.

“First of all, it’s dramatically cheaper and easier for us to build and manage on SharePoint now than in the past,” he says. “The product is really good out of the box. We don’t need to focus as much time and budget to design elements, mobile responsiveness, and accessibility. It hardly needs any customization, and that’s really exciting from an IT and life-cycle management perspective.”

For example, the previous version of MSW had 13 custom elements built and managed by an internal development team. This required that the team build individual parts for sections of MSW like the home page layout and for sections of the site like the news and events tabs. The new version, by comparison, was built almost entirely using out-of-box functionality, requiring only three customizations.

“Now those customizations all come built in, they’re high quality, fast to use, and are free,” Crewdson says. “They definitely come with some sizzle.”

As a result, the Employee Communications Team doesn’t need to budget for as much customization to build and operate MSW.

“The new SharePoint Framework is based on open standards and is very friendly,” he says. “You can develop on any JavaScript framework that you want. You can choose the language you want to use. You can write in a way that makes sense for you. It’s all about developing in SharePoint in a way that makes sense to you.”

It used to be that you needed a specialized SharePoint developer just to make your site look nice. And too often, time and budget restrictions curbed efforts to then make the portal responsive and accessible on mobile devices.

“A lot of teams that tried SharePoint 8 to 10 years ago found it was ugly by default,” Crewdson says. “It required developer interaction to make it pretty, and when you had to hire that developer, it was kind of hard to find that person—you had to go and find someone who was knowledgeable about doing it the SharePoint way.”

In addition to allowing site owners to create beautiful pages, SharePoint now is much more accessible.

“Engaging all Microsoft employees is part of our core mission. The new version is accessible by default,” Crewdson says. “In the old days, we had to build accessibility in. Now we get that out of the box. In fact, each engineering feature goes through both experience and accessibility reviews before anything moves into production.”

Learn how Microsoft Digital Employee Experience supports the company’s use of SharePoint.

To learn more about SharePoint, check out the SharePoint Admin documentation and SharePoint end-user documentation. Read this blog to catch up on what the SharePoint product group presented at Microsoft Ignite.

• See how work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.
• Learn how OneDrive for Business feature shifts how employees save files within Microsoft.
• The key to rolling out Microsoft Teams on home turf: Good governance.

The post Microsoft moves its main employee portal to latest version of SharePoint appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft has migrated its internal Human Resources portal to the cloud, a key step in its ongoing companywide digital transformation. Called HRweb, the portal is the second busiest at Microsoft, and represents the last major internal employee portal to move to the cloud. The migration has transformed the experience the company’s employees have when they engage with HR.

The move from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online created many improvements, including serving up smarter personalized information to employees and delivering better search results, says Jay Clem, general manager of Industry Solutions in Microsoft Digital.

“Shortly before I joined the group, plans were in place to move from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online,” Clem says. “It was largely a technology transition, but we knew that, for employees to have the best experience possible, we also needed to change core business processes in HR.”

The shift wasn’t without challenges.

The first attempt to move to the cloud was two and a half years ago. The team had scoped the move but was closely watching two HR services that had just launched that were not performing as well as expected. In addition, the team’s plan to copy the existing HRweb portal to SharePoint Online using a “lift and shift” model wasn’t robust as it needed be across multiple devices, and it didn’t do enough to take advantage of the benefits of moving to SharePoint Online. For those reasons, a decision was made to call off the migration and go back to the drawing board.

“Today the story is different,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal group program manager on the Microsoft Digital Human Resources team. “This time we were fully prepared, and the technology was ready and capable.”

The Human Resources IT function is more robust, and procedures for moving internal portals to SharePoint Online have matured, she says, pointing to several other internal portals successfully making the move to SharePoint Online. Additionally, the connection between Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT group, and the Human Resources function is tighter.

There were several technical reasons why the just-finished migration went so well, but there is also a more simple, human reason. “The difference was Joseph,” Krishnamurthy says.

Joseph is Joseph Jassey, Director Industry Digital Strategy – Industry Solutions in Microsoft Digital who not only led the HRweb migration, along with Cameron Thompson and the Human Resources team, but built it from the ground up, gaining key support from everyone involved well before the actual migration started.

“Joseph, Cameron, and the team have worked long and hard to leverage our SharePoint Online platform for HRweb,” says Andrew Winnemore, a general manager of human services for Human Resources.
For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEQrRhVJp9w, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Getting it rightA natural storyteller, Jassey led the migration in his own unique way.“When I came on board, I was hired specifically for this,” Jassey says. “They said, ‘Here is our portal, we want to move to the cloud, we have 90,000 global employees using this every month, can you help us do this?’The first thing Jassey did was figure out why the migration didn’t work the first time.

“You’re not just dealing with the technical aspects of it, you also need to look at the culture, about why we do things the way we do them—why people weren’t ready for the move.”

As Jassey dug in, he learned the migration was cancelled for a variety of reasons: a website that was overly complex, a host of technical challenges, a business group that was wary due to a recent bumpy roll-out, and hesitation from internal leadership for such a wholesale shift. There were tactical challenges as well, including uncertainty around using lift and shift to move the entire site “as is,” concerns that performance would be slower in the cloud, questions around search functionality, and rising security standards.

Along with a series of personal interviews across teams, Jassey benchmarked with portals that had been successful, including the IT and legal sites, which had just finished their own migrations. After a tour of the Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) portal, he liked what he saw, and brought those lessons back to HR.

The Human Resources Microsoft Digital leadership team loved seeing the CELA success story. With their interest piqued, Jassey asked for a proof of concept—nothing big, just something that dabbled in what was possible. “I told them, ‘This is how we want to approach this,’” Jassey says. “We can start small and see how it can be done.’”

Jassey drove moving a section of HRweb documentation to the cloud, sending a small amount of real, representative information. It worked, and Jassey then asked to move the full website in the same way. “I wanted them to feel confident, and that it was easy,” he says.

The original migration was built around a “lift and shift” approach, which called for copying everything on premises on SharePoint 2010 directly to SharePoint Online. The prevailing thinking suggested that most of the work was done two and half years ago—why not just pick that up and run with it?

But there were concerns with that approach. “I felt that would put us in the same structure as before, and I didn’t think it would give us the opportunity to rethink everything. From my research and conversations, I felt we needed a fresh start, new thinking, to push through it—I knew it could be done.”

Asking ‘why not?’

Jassey, who mentors kids who immigrate to the US from his native Gambia, is always encouraging everyone he meets to get out of their comfort zone, and the HRweb migration to SharePoint Online was no different.

“A growth mindset—that’s when you feel uncomfortable, that’s when you grow,” he says.

For the kids, it means encouraging them to consider careers in technology. For the Microsoft employees who worked on the HRweb migration, it was encouraging them to feel safe starting from scratch.

By starting over, the team was able to fix many existing problems like simplifying content, reducing subsites (moving from 398 subsites down to just 12), and simplifying security. The team was also able to make the employee experience more personal.

The result is a site, by early reviews, that is winning accolades from both employees and HR.

“It’s been a real joy to watch how the team has worked together to get us to this point,” Winnemore says. “Moving to the cloud is helping us build a first-class employee experience and modernize our HR systems and processes.”

For his part, Jassey says the human component cannot be underestimated. Having a dedicated, flexible team that was willing to try innovative approaches working on the project was the key differentiator.

• Explore upgrading Microsoft’s core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors
• Discover how Microsoft’s HR portal gets personal, thanks to the modern experience in SharePoint
• Read more about shining a light on how Microsoft manages Shadow IT

The post Microsoft moves its Human Resources employee portal to SharePoint Online appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

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

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

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

Solving that challenge meant getting inside people’s heads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a feature that has been widely appreciated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With sensitivity labels, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), the organization that supports, protects, and empowers the company, can now proactively enforce policies to keep shared workspaces safe. Microsoft 365 groups, SharePoint sites, Teams, Viva Engage communities, and any container used throughout Microsoft now utilize sensitivity labels to identify and proactively protect valuable information. In doing so, Microsoft can strengthen self-service without exposing sensitive information.

What sensitivity labels mean for Microsoft

Regardless of the technology behind it, labels represent a visual cue to people interacting with a shared workspace or document. Labels can inform an enterprise’s governance practices, letting the organization describe the landscape to properly manage it and enact the right policies.

At Microsoft, labels enable our employees to identify different degrees of value. Based on the label, we can apply the right amount of protection.

Previously, when a Microsoft employee created a new group a Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD) label would help classify it, denoting who should have access to the shared workspace according to Microsoft’s policies. On its own, an AAD label doesn’t do anything; it’s simply a string of descriptive text incapable of enforcement. Custom scripts run by administrators would apply policy rules based on these AAD labels. As a consequence of the gap between classification and enforcement, users could accidentally ignore the policies, creating circumstances where the group is out of compliance. Once the non-compliant container is recognized and remediated by the custom solutions, the user might be surprised or disrupted by enforcement actions taken to protect and secure the workspace.

In moving to sensitivity labels, we in MDEE are able to further empower users with compliant self-service right out of the box. Enforcement happens through sensitivity labels, so users are never disrupted or required to take additional compliance actions; they have a clear understanding of classification from the start, creating a better user experience while protecting the enterprise. The migration allows the organization to retire several custom solutions that are no longer necessary. Sensitivity labels have also enabled us to unify content and container classifications, creating consistent taxonomy and the opportunity for centralized administration.

Labels define the culture

Applying labels to a workspace not only informs the organization as to what a site or container is, but drives a culture of good governance. To have a successful implementation of sensitivity labels, MDEE built strong, meaningful, and self-explanatory labels. Alignment with partners at Microsoft Digital Security and Resilience (DSR) meant labels could communicate the level of sensitivity in the workplace or document without a technical explanation.

At Microsoft, we use four labels for container and file classification:

• Highly confidential. The most critical data for Microsoft. We share it only with named recipients.
• Confidential. Crucial to achieving Microsoft’s goals. Limited distribution—these are on a need-to-know basis.
• General. Daily work used and shared throughout Microsoft, like personal settings and postal codes. We share these throughout Microsoft internally.
• Public. Unrestricted data meant for public consumption, like publicly released source code and announced financials. We share these freely.

These definitions inform policies from a technological side, and once taxonomy was established, we were able to enforce consistent security policies across the company. From a user’s perspective, understanding these terms is easier to comprehend than the underlying rules and settings behind the classifications. Labels are intended to support security without creating an extra burden for users. It’s not always easy for users to understand the details of security, but they do understand constructs like “General,” “Confidential,” and “Highly Confidential.”

Aligning on label taxonomy also secured buy-in for company defaults. For some companies, governance policies are open by default, whereas Microsoft is closed.

With the new sensitivity labels, container classification communicates four things:

• Privacy level. Labels determine whether the workspace is broadly available internally or a private site.
• External permissions. Guest allowance is administered via the group’s classification, allowing specified partners to access teams when appropriate.
• Sharing guidelines. Important governance policies are tied to the container’s label. For example, can this workspace be shared outside of Microsoft? Is this group limited to a specific division or team? Or is it restricted to specific people? The label establishes these rules.
• Conditional access. While not implemented at Microsoft, tying identity and device verification to container labels introduces additional governance controls.

Unification makes things simpler

Prior to sensitivity labels, AAD tagged containers at a tenant level with document labeling being handled by security and compliance, or Microsoft Purview Information Protection. As a consequence, the two artifacts lived in two separate locations, requiring administrators to visit different sites for managing governance.

The two locations also meant container labels worked a little differently than document labels. Where tenant-level AAD labels for a container would display an entire list of classifications, document labels only showed classifications that were appropriate to the user. Once unified, sensitivity labels for containers only populate appropriate classifications, limiting the list to valid labels for the users and groups.

Shifting labels from AAD to Microsoft Purview Information Protection, where data-loss prevention and retention takes place, unified labels across the company, reduced the workload for administrators, and allowed Microsoft to take another step forward in readying the environment.

Strategic governance with labels

By using terms for labels that mean something to people, label definition becomes intuitive and reinforces a culture of accountability. Establishing this level of awareness creates corporate buy-in. Getting the company to stand behind these specific label classifications not only supports a consistent experience, but informs corporate strategy decisions around privacy and sharing.

Rationalizing a hierarchy of policies establishes where you are today and where you’ll be tomorrow. Currently, there’s no concept of inheritance between a container and its content. Labeling a workspace highly confidential does not pass that trait on to documents stored inside. In the future, however, unified taxonomy and centralized administration creates the opportunity for an efficient connection between the workspace’s label and the classification of documents within.

Readying Microsoft for sensitivity labels

For some organizations, those coming from a green state with no existing AAD classifications in place, sensitivity labels can be easily onboarded, and offer a chance to introduce a strong culture of governance.

But for companies like us at Microsoft, where existing AAD labels and custom governance solutions were already established, moving to sensitivity labels required preparation and alignment across the company before migration could occur.

Aligning on label definition

Onboarding sensitivity labels gave us an opportunity to create consistent classification language for containers. This entailed conversations about balancing employee experience and enablement with security and legal implications. Agreeing on taxonomy and selecting terms with meaning allowed us to protect the enterprise while empowering self-service.

Planning the migration

With clear taxonomy and a strong governance strategy, we were ready to start working on the logistics of applying sensitivity labels to existing containers. Careful coordination, including organized efforts and timing, prevented users from experiencing any disruptions in productivity or security while sensitivity labels were rolled out.

Synchronizing timelines with stakeholders

For a short period, we existed in a unique hybrid state, with both AAD and sensitivity labels active across the enterprise. To avoid any derailments or threats to the environment, we in MDEE had to time the conversion of existing labels to new sensitivity labels correctly.

Whether it be Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, or a Microsoft 365 group, certain user interface and backend changes had to be completed to enable sensitivity labels. All stakeholders agreed to tasks and workloads that needed to be completed during a specific release cadence. This allowed the hybrid environment to be resolved without placing Microsoft at risk.

Coordination between stakeholders also meant MDEE had to support teams with smaller engineering capabilities, empowering them to complete tasks on schedule.

Mapping the scope of impact

There are over 333,000 Microsoft 365 groups at Microsoft, 55,000 SharePoint sites, and thousands of Viva Engage communities. Planning out the migration meant closely surveying these environments to understand what might be encountered and require attention before, during, and after the migration.

• How many groups are already labeled? Whether they be sensitivity labels or AAD labels, the current environment was evaluated for labels and their classification. Roughly 86 percent of groups at Microsoft had some kind of label prior to migration.
• Do existing containers map to sensitivity labels? Since previous tags were strings of text, they did not necessarily align with the new taxonomy. To reduce confusion, existing AAD labels were mapped to Microsoft Purview Information Protection container labels.
• What were the challenges they had to overcome? Once teams in MDEE understood the labelling conventions of containers, they could better understand if an area might break due to changes.
• Which groups have exceptions? Certain users required exceptions for policies relating to specific containers. Identifying these items meant we could avoid disruptions to users with specialized needs, all without exposing valuable information.

Resolving and retiring custom solutions

Having mapped out the environment, we could then reduce our reliance on the custom tooling that scanned AAD labels to trigger security and compliance settings. From an engineering perspective, this straightforward step meant labels would no longer call an API but make calls on behalf of users to get applicable labels.

1. Remove old references.
2. Locate and update calls and permissions.
3. Ensure that anything still needing custom tooling is handled with delegate permissions.

Addressing label assignment to groups

Only group owners and global administrators can assign a label to a group directly. This posed a unique challenge for us. Custom scripts run by global administrators could change the labels of these containers, but it was estimated to take at least 27 hours, which far exceeds Microsoft’s access policy for global administrators. Adding to the challenge, the administrator’s computer would be locked down and required to stay active throughout the duration.

Having a global administrator handle these responsibilities wasn’t going to happen and giving someone global administrator status for one job was a non-starter.

This required us to develop a different solution.

Thinking through the problem, the team recognized that labels set in SharePoint through AAD will get synced back to Microsoft 365, which is also a container. Knowing this, we were able to use custom workflows to map and migrate sensitivity labels for containers through an app, instead of a group owner, without compromising security.

Develop a rollback plan

Migrating to sensitivity labels would not use deployment rings. Once the PowerShell script was executed, the environment would be transformed by the new classification system. Extensive testing was done to identify break points and what the system could handle, but we also built tools to revert to the last good state if needed.

Several scenarios were defined, and of these, key indicators and circumstances were recognized as trigger events that would necessitate a rollback. Simultaneously, certain scenarios also helped to identify if there were any points of failure that we could coexist with until a fix was put in place.

Test tenants can only reveal so much about the real environment, and the team had the data points in place to demonstrate a successful migration but having a rollback plan in place meant they could reverse course and restore Microsoft’s environment to a working state in a pinch.

Readying users

Part of our duty is to inform and educate users about new features.

Sensitivity labels not only meant new label structures and compliance practices, but introduced new concepts, like parent and child labels for containers.

Child labels already existed for documents, but AAD labels were unable to offer this kind of granular definition for containers. The combination of parent and child labels in containers required users to understand how this relationship might impact shared workspaces, especially unique situations like containers that are internally confidential and require an NDA for external users.

Previous steps, like creating consistent taxonomy and classification across labels, made it easier for users to understand the impact of new labels.

Post-deployment validation

After migrating to sensitivity labels, we carefully examined the environment to make sure our workloads interacted as expected. This included testing multiple Microsoft 365 applications, provisioning groups in Viva Engage, and making sure that the correct labels were being applied by default.

Our team also checked to make sure users, legacy applications, and custom tooling were no longer able to make groups without labels. After investigating the Microsoft 365 environment, we felt confident that we could move forward with finalizing the migration to sensitivity labels for other product partners.

Our labelling environment now supports modern productivity while keeping the company safe. Users can freely self-service new groups without accidentally violating our governance practices. Tying policy enforcement to labels transformed a reactive compliance process into a proactive model, reducing the workload on administrators and allowing us to retire several custom solutions.

• Labels now self-enforce. Users who create a group in Microsoft’s environment will now be prompted to select a label classification, which will apply the correct ruleset on creation. Sensitivity labels make tags more than just a string of descriptive text, but a way to assure compliance in a self-service environment.
• Ability to release new policies quickly. We have already created and released new policies and guiding principles, all enabled by the speed and agility surrounding sensitivity labels. Several compliance policies can be tied to sensitivity labels, which makes it easy to push and enforce rules.
• Managing the tenant is easier. Under AAD labels, changing taxonomy meant you had to re-write over string values on every group. Sensitivity labels make managing at a tenant level easier.

With sensitivity labels rolling out across Microsoft, it’s easier for users and for us to support self-service and governance at the same time.

• Learn about sensitivity labels.
• Protect documents with sensitivity labels.

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