But one of the areas where Microsoft Teams has not received enough credit is the way in which it has helped ease several gaps created by the physical distance and missing connection brought on by remote-only or hybrid work environments.

As an employee who started at Microsoft during the pandemic and works 100 percent remotely, Microsoft Teams is the sole product that has afforded me the ability to cultivate strong relationships with colleagues that I have never physically met. The same types of “hour-long lunch date, over share about your personal life, and solve all the problems of the company” conversations that I had with teammates at former jobs pre-pandemic have still been possible thanks to the authentic connections that I have established via Microsoft Teams.

Now I understand that not all employers see these types of conversations as fruitful or productive, but I do know that all employers value the importance of a strong company culture and connection between colleagues. So how does one go about making these types of authentic relationships when they are brand new to a company and separated physically from the rest of their team?

Seeing a real need to help new hires successfully onboard during the pandemic, several organizations within Microsoft were looking for an innovative way to drive connection while removing the awkwardness of being the new employee and the pressures that come with having to be the first person to proactively reach out. So, some great minds within Microsoft Teams Customer and Partner Ecosystem, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, and its India Development Center (IDC) got together to figure out a way to solve this.

“Working together with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, we looked for a new way to enable and spark human connection within Microsoft Teams to help solve for some experiences that employees were missing due to the pandemic,” says Eu Nice Loh, a customer and partner ecosystem senior product manager on the Microsoft Teams product group.

Deploying the Icebreaker app

Icebreaker is based on a template created by the Microsoft Teams product group. This app is hosted in Microsoft Azure and backed by the Microsoft Azure Bot Framework that can be deployed to any company’s Microsoft Teams apps store. It aims to do the work of sparking connections by randomly pairing team members to help them build trust and encourage valuable, meaningful, long-term, and personal connections.

Microsoft’s Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) organization was one of the first to adopt the out-of-the-box Icebreaker as part of their onboarding experience. When the pandemic first hit, they realized they would need to completely rethink the way they did their onboarding and sales training. Previously, the program had been a two-week immersion at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Washington where new hires were flown in for onboarding, training, networking, and to build their social capital within the company.

Paola Medina, a business program manager with the MCAPS onboarding team, quickly got to work on finding new ways to foster connection within MCAPS new hire communities.

Even with hybrid work and people returning to the office, Icebreaker continues to be ranked high for MCAPS new hires as their favorite tool for connection, and we have found it to be more cost effective than some of our previous alternatives. In strained financial times, where many companies’ budgets for networking, morale-related events and internal company travel might be limited, the Icebreaker app is a great tool to help initiate connections that were once mainly nurtured by in-person activities.

—Paola Medina, business program manager, MCAPS onboarding team

“I started exploring for ways to help build engagement within MCAPS onboarding during this unique time and stumbled upon the app template for Icebreaker,” Medina says. “After some trial and error, I was able to figure out how to deploy the app, and we started using it with new hires worldwide as a way for them to connect and foster belonging. It has been such a powerful tool for bringing people together.”

Thousands of MCAPS new hires have accessed Icebreaker over the past few years, and they continue to use the app as a critical tool of engagement. Originally as a solution for remote work and office shutdowns brought on by the pandemic, it has continued to prove its usefulness, especially now during challenging economic times.

“Even with hybrid work and people returning to the office, Icebreaker continues to be ranked high for MCAPS new hires as their favorite tool for connection, and we have found it to be more cost effective than some of our previous alternatives,” Medina says. “In strained financial times, where many companies’ budgets for networking, morale-related events and internal company travel might be limited, the Icebreaker app is a great tool to help initiate connections that were once mainly nurtured by in-person activities.”

Not only did we have great team engagement, but it ended up fostering different types of conversations. You had people having casual discussions, in some instances with managers a few levels above them, that may never have happened without Icebreaker. It also led to becoming a great mentoring app for many.

—Timi Bolaji, software engineer, Xbox

xCloud, Microsoft’s Xbox cloud gaming team, has also utilized the Icebreaker app with much success. In fact, in a recent survey taken by xCloud employees, 97 percent of the participants said that the Icebreaker app gave them the ability to make new relationships across the organization.

Timi Bolaji, a software engineer with Xbox and a member of their Culture team, was the one to first introduce Icebreaker to his organization. He felt like the initial Icebreaker app was very approachable, and the documentation was particularly good, but for it to be successful for the xCloud team, he would need to make some technical changes that would better suit his teams’ needs and ensure usage.

“Not only did we have great team engagement, but it ended up fostering different types of conversations,” Bolaji says. “You had people having casual discussions, in some instances with managers a few levels above them, that may never have happened without Icebreaker. It also led to becoming a great mentoring app for many.”

This company-wide need to continue to foster personal connections in a hybrid environment brought together a team with the best suited skill sets to enhance the Icebreaker app. The Microsoft Teams product group set out to design a new experience that would feel fully native to Teams. Also, they provided insights into potential improvements through usage of the latest Teams software development kit (SDK) and Adaptive Cards features.

IDC, one of Microsoft’s premier centers for engineering and innovation, and others on the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team united modern designs, enterprise-scale performance requirements, new technology capabilities, and Microsoft’s internal app compliance standards to create an improved version of Icebreaker.

Before we could deploy it, we needed to ensure that it could be used by multiple Teams simultaneously using a single set of Azure resources, and the backend service could handle the complex logic of pairing-up employees from different teams based on individual user preferences and Team settings. The scalability requirement drove the re-architecture of the application and broke it down into multiple micro-services, so now the app can be installed by any team in the company.

“In addition to making these changes, we had the opportunity to validate our approach with internal users who had already used Icebreaker and iterate on that feedback,” says Balasubramanyam Janakiraman, a principal software engineering manager leading IDC’s engineering team and overseeing the technical implementation of Icebreaker. “After four months of running the app in pilot, hundreds of teams at Microsoft are now using the new and improved version.”

What we learned as Customer Zero

From all the internal employee usage of the Icebreaker app has come great insight and response. For instance, Medina was instrumental in helping the Icebreaker product team improve the app based on the collective feedback she received from the MCAPS organization.

Some of the top recommendations for improvements included:

• Pulling profile data to present on the app card when matching occurs
• Feature to adjust scheduling, frequency, and matching for Team Owners and Team Members
• Improved messaging, language, and user experience within the App
• Incorporating conversation starters to the app when matched to ease connections
• Ability to modify time options for the “pause matching” feature

“It’s been a real collaborative effort between us, IDC, the Microsoft Teams product group, and our internal customers to get the Icebreaker app where it is today,” says Mykhailo Sydorchuk, a Teams productivity senior program manager with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “Through the feedback we have received from our employees, we’re able to improve the app and make it even more useful for cultivating strong connections and helping solve the gap created over the past few years.”

The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team takes our mission to power, protect, and transform Microsoft very seriously. Part of that responsibility is ensuring that Microsoft employees can thrive in a flexible hybrid work environment. As Customer Zero for many products and services, our team obsesses over every aspect of an employee’s experience. Finding ways to better our culture through connectivity and strong relationships is all part of that commitment.

Microsoft Teams will continue to play an integral role in helping our employees and customers connect, collaborate, and explore for many years to come. Innovations like the Icebreaker app are just a small indication of what is still yet to come for Teams as we prepare for many advancements that will continue to enable deep connections within many dimensions.

Are you a customer wanting to learn more about the Icebreaker app in Microsoft Teams or how you and your organization can use Microsoft Teams to foster culture and connectivity? Please go to: https://github.com/OfficeDev/microsoft-teams-apps-icebreaker

Also, if you want to learn more from Paola Medina on her experience as a Microsoft employee and the importance of building community with the Icebreaker app, check out this video.

• Check out these five ways Microsoft Teams has transformed Microsoft.
• Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.
• Learn how we’re transforming how meetings happen at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Discover Microsoft’s tips for staying productive in an evolving hybrid world.

The post New Microsoft Teams app helps facilitate employee connectivity in a challenging hybrid work environment appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When it became clear that Microsoft was going to ask its employees to work remotely, Kimberly Nafziger knew she would need to move quickly.

She was organizing an in-person, all-hands meeting for the 5,500 employees in Microsoft Digital. A large room was secured, a film crew was ready to broadcast to those who would attend remotely, and breakfast was ordered for those who would be there in person. The “Ask Me Anything” meeting with Kurt DelBene, executive vice president of Corporate Strategy and Microsoft Digital, was set to occur the next day.

Then DelBene decided to convert the meeting to online, out of an abundance of caution over the worsening COVID-19 situation.

“At 1:00 PM on Monday, March 2, we made the decision to make the meeting virtual,” Nafziger says. The changeover was completed in just hours, she says, explaining that it wasn’t that difficult because the meeting was already scheduled to be broadcast on Microsoft’s large meeting platform, live events in Microsoft 365. “We were ready to go by Tuesday, at 9:00 AM, when the meeting was scheduled to start.”

Leaders at Microsoft use live events in Microsoft 365 to run large internal and external meetings with connected video streaming, conversations, and content sharing. Depending on their needs, the meeting host can choose between simple do-it-yourself events using Microsoft Teams or Yammer, to large-scale professional events using Yammer or Microsoft Stream. The live events capabilities are available to all customers—go here to learn more about how to select the right live event experience for your event.

Like many Microsoft products and services, live events in Microsoft 365 enable company employees to stay connected as they work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re not working from home in isolation,” says Andrew Wilson, Microsoft’s chief digital officer and corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “This is about our digital platforms empowering us to make human connections at a time when coming together and supporting each other is super important—it’s allowing us to be a fluid workforce that is staying productive in tough circumstances.”

Wilson says Microsoft leaders are using live events and other company technology to support their teams.

“There is an absolute need for leaders to be accessible, social, interactive, and communicative during times like these,” he says. “Even if there wasn’t a crisis, using technology to stay connected with your employees is a table-stakes requirement for any leader to be effective today.”

As for DelBene’s “Ask Me Anything” meeting?

“At first, it felt like a scary decision to go all virtual because there were a lot of logistics that needed to come together, but it went very well,” Nafziger says. “Having the meeting already set up to leverage the live events capabilities was pivotal.”

She says DelBene and his leadership team gathered in the conference room because the video crew was already set up to shoot there.

“We had all of our speakers attend in person,” she says, explaining that Microsoft had not yet made the decision to have all non-essential employees work remotely. “They did great even though there wasn’t an audience in the room.”

Nafziger says it ended up being the largest online audience they ever had for DelBene’s “Ask Me Anything” meeting. Additionally, the virtual attendees weren’t shy—they used Yammer’s conversation feature to ask DelBene, Wilson, and the rest of the leadership team questions about how the company was responding to COVID-19.

“Using Yammer allowed us to draw our employees into the meeting,” Nafziger says. “They could see each other’s questions and comments pop up while watching the presentation. It was fun to see them answering questions and engaging with each other even though we were all in separate locations.”

To include the audience even more, the team appointed a moderator to read questions coming through on Yammer to DelBene and his leadership team. The moderator sparked the conversation with pre-submitted questions and then switched to live questions as they appeared on the Yammer feed.

After the event, the video was automatically published in Stream as an on-demand recording. “We posted the recording to our organization’s SharePoint site for employees to watch at their convenience,” Nafziger says.

Usage of live events has spiked across Microsoft as the entire company has moved exclusively to remote working. No matter the scale of the meeting, leaders are using it to replicate the human connection that happens when they meet with their teams in person.

That was certainly true for the Field Engagement and Delivery (FED) and Global Support teams, which count on its in-person global meeting held every two years to bring together its 258 employees across 46 countries and 80 cities.

“Our teams are very dispersed across the globe,” says Belinda Deverson, from Global Support based in Sydney, Australia. “We all look forward to this conference to connect with each other in person.”

Due to COVID-19, the team made the tough decision to switch to a virtual-only meeting just days before it was scheduled to start. They used the live events capabilities to broadcast the leadership team’s presentation to everyone at all their dispersed locations and used Microsoft Teams and Yammer to engage with their team members.

“On February 19, our leadership team sent an email announcing that we were moving to a virtual conference,” Deverson says. “We made the change in five business days.”

It was a change that required coordination by many people in many different countries and time zones. The leadership team made the decision to make their presentations at two different times so that employees could watch it live at a time that was convenient for them. Additionally, smaller groups of employees met via a series of Microsoft Teams meetings to reconnect, bond, and participate in fun team-building exercises.

“Shifting to virtual still felt inclusive because we were interacting together in the moment,” says Deverson. Being intentional about connecting with each other and making sure everyone’s cameras were on helped. “Even though we were thousands of miles away from each other, we were able to use our technology to create a collaborative and productive virtual environment while building a stronger community.”

[Read this case study on how Microsoft uses live events in Microsoft 365.]

Interest in live events is spiking

“At times like these, you need to be pumping out your readiness material,” says Eva Etchells, a business program manager in Microsoft Digital who shows employees how to get the most out of using Microsoft 365 products. “We have been pulling together all our existing content and combining it in new ways to reflect the new remote working world that we are in,” she says.

Microsoft customers are facing the same situation as Microsoft employees. They need to connect with colleagues who suddenly feel disconnected and isolated.

“Just like us, they’re trying to figure it out, and they find it really useful to see how we’re doing it here at Microsoft,” says Alex Vo, a senior services engineer in Microsoft Digital who shows external companies how Microsoft uses live events in Microsoft 365. “A lot of them are heavy users of Microsoft 365 who are using our older product, Skype Meeting Broadcast. They want us to tell them what they’ll get out of upgrading to live events in Microsoft 365.”

Vo is hearing from a variety of customers. Some have large offices of people that are used to working together and are now working from home, and others have small teams of employees dispersed across the country and the world.

“In both cases, they want to have better engagement with their employees,” Vo says.

Most companies he talks to have just a few people who are responsible for figuring out how to run the remote meetings, who their companies are suddenly relying on.

“They want high-end, production-quality video so that they can get their people to participate. But their budgets are tight, so they’re looking for something that doesn’t cost a lot of money,” he says. “They also want to know how hard it is to set up and how to get started.”

Vo walks them through how Microsoft uses live events and lets them know that it’s something that they likely already have or can easily add to their Microsoft 365 subscription. He also connects them with product group managers like Ashwin Appiah and Kasia Krzoska, who show customers how to use live events (Appiah from the point of view of Microsoft Teams, and Krzoska with a focus on Yammer).

Both Appiah and Krzoska say interest in the live events capabilities has surged, with many customers asking how to run their own events. They, like Vo, say the way Microsoft is using the product really helps them show customers what it can do.

“It’s really great to see, during times of crisis, how well everyone at Microsoft has been able to transition from an offline or hybrid experience to working exclusively online,” Appiah says. “We have provided tools for them to do that, but they are the ones who are running with it and making it work.”

Krzoska agrees, saying it’s great to see Microsoft employees use these tools to get work done during the crisis, but it’s even more impressive how they’re supporting each other on a human level.

“This just shows what a great company culture we have,” she says. “What has been remarkable is seeing how employees are using our products to cultivate togetherness and keep their conversations going.”

How to use live events in Microsoft 365

Microsoft Digital uses live events in Microsoft 365 to create, run, and share events of different types, audiences, and budgets, says Frank Delia, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital. Those range from global all-hands meetings with thousands of participants to team

“This is how our leaders from around the company connect with their people,” Delia says. “It’s how they drive employee engagement, share information, and get feedback.”

So how do live events work?

Depending on the needs of the event, Microsoft Teams, Stream, and Yammer work together to create an event. But it goes beyond that, Delia says. They all combine audio and video and have recordings available in Stream. Here’s how they each contribute:

• Microsoft Teams events allow for external attendees and moderated Q&A, relying on a seamless event-production environment that provides screen sharing and video without the need for third-party apps or services.
• Stream brings video streaming that works live and on-demand on many different viewers and devices. It includes video recording, automatic transcription, closed captioning, rich-text video search, and segment broadcast clips that work across all live events in Microsoft 365. You can also embed Stream into a SharePoint site.
• Yammer brings rich conversations and a dedicated event page to drive engagement before, during, and after the event. You can produce events hosted in Yammer using Microsoft Teams or with a third-party encoder, but the events are not available to external attendees.

Microsoft uses Yammer for company town halls that require open discussion, Microsoft Teams for one-to-many scenarios and events with partners and customers, and Stream for events that will be embedded and viewed on the company intranet.

When high-end video production is needed, live events in Yammer and Stream can connect to a third-party encoder, which gives event managers and production teams more tools to manage the meeting broadcast. These tools range from managing video quality, to choosing what to show their audience, to producing the flow of the presentation.

Delia says that leaders across Microsoft are clearly using live events much more—usage has gone up by about 300 percent—now that most employees are working remotely. “It’s really holding up well,” he says. “It’s teaching us a lot about what we can do when it comes to remote working.”

Microsoft is learning from the recent uptick in usage and is working hard to add features and additional scalability to support larger events, including a new live events resource site dedicated to helping customers understand how to host and manage live events, Appiah says.

“We think we can learn from this,” he says. “We can learn how to build a better product.”

Launching live events in Microsoft 365

• Get a primer on getting started on live events.
• Watch this live events primer video.
• Go here to get a detailed overview of live events.
• Get assistance running your live event.
• Go here for a primer on how admins can get started with both Microsoft Teams and live events meetings.

Here are additional resources to learn more about how Microsoft uses live events internally:

• Read this case study on how Microsoft uses live events in Microsoft 365.
• Chasing the sun with live events in Microsoft Teams.
• IT expert roundtable: Migrating to live events in Microsoft 365 from Skype Meeting Broadcast.

The post How Microsoft moved its large meetings online with live events in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his leadership team wanted to bring Microsoft together after asking company employees to work from home in response to COVID-19.

“We wanted to be able to bring everyone together virtually in a way that would allow our leaders to share their thoughts with employees, but also to address many of the hard questions that we knew employees were asking,” says John Cirone, director of employee communications at Microsoft. “We wanted to share a moment where we could talk about how we were mobilizing our response to COVID-19 across our employees, customers, and our communities.”

Normally company leaders meet with employees once a month for an Employee Town Hall and Q&A. They typically gather in a café somewhere on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington. Though several hundred employees gather in the room, the meetings are primarily virtual. Microsoft Production Studios uses live events in Microsoft 365 to broadcast the town halls to the company’s 151,000 employees. People attend the event in Yammer, where they can engage and ask leaders the questions that drive the Q&A. After the event, people can catch up with the event recording and search for specific moments in the automatically generated transcript and table of contents in Stream.

“We use these meetings to have a reoccurring dialogue with our employees that centers around the company’s mission, its aspire-to culture, and its strategy,” Cirone says. “Our employees can watch from anywhere in the world live or on-demand. The CEO and the leadership team share their top-of-mind thoughts, give their insights on recent company news, and answer questions that employees have. We hold these events every month, regardless of key company-news moments, as the goal is to engage in a continuous dialogue—that’s really the key, it’s about ongoing leader and employee engagement in a way that allows our leaders to be personal at scale.”

[Learn more about how leaders across Microsoft are using live events in Microsoft 365 to connect with their teams. Read this case study on how Microsoft uses live events in Microsoft 365.]

Turning to live events in Microsoft 365

When it came to the March employee Q&A, stay-at-home-measures meant that company leaders would not be able to gather in one space for the event. And while the live-events platform would allow the CEO to virtually broadcast to employees, additional steps would be needed to support the Senior Leadership Team’s goal of joining virtually for the broadcast.

That created a challenge that the team needed to overcome.

“One of the event principles is that both the CEO and his leadership team gather together to talk directly with employees during these events.,” Cirone says. “They are always there in the room or on-camera, responding together to the questions that come up.”

Once it became clear how important it was to have the full leadership team come together virtually, the Microsoft Employee Communications and Microsoft Production Studios teams partnered with the Microsoft 365 product group to find a solution.

How did they solve the remote working challenge?

“What we came up with is having them all join a Microsoft Teams meeting and broadcasting that meeting to the entire company as a live event,” says John Schoonover, manager of Facility and Production Solutions at Microsoft Production Studios. “That way they could talk with each other and answer questions from employees very naturally—they meet on Microsoft Teams all the time. And on the audience side, employees could see them interacting with each other and could ask them questions on Yammer.”

How did it go?

“The technology worked great,” says Schoonover, who says his desire to be in control of the show flow was tested. “We had a few production challenges that we had to work out.”

Those challenges had to do with managing a meeting with 17 participants reporting in from locations that he didn’t control.

“The cameras, the microphones, the lighting, their bandwidth—everything was in their homes and out of our reach,” Schoonover says. “It’s unsettling any time you don’t have full control over a production. We had some nervousness over having the best possible experience for our participants and for the audience.”

Guidelines were shared. Advice was given. The leadership team was asked to join the meeting a few minutes early, giving Schoonover and his team a chance to quickly review each person’s setup. How did they sound? Was the lighting adequate? Were they the right distance from their camera? Would they please remember to go on and off mute at the right time?

“It absolutely went smoothly,” Schoonover says. “There were a couple of times when someone’s bandwidth became an issue and their image froze up—we had a still image of them ready to go and we were able to switch over to it when that occurred.”

The other major challenge Schoonover’s team faced was managing the event flow—who would speak when and whose face should appear on the Teams interface that the audience was seeing. They were helped greatly by a new feature in Teams (soon to be released publicly) that allows more than four people to be shown on the meeting interface at once.

They needed the added flexibility because they didn’t know which of the 17 leaders was going to speak next.

“The Teams meeting was technically in control,” he says. “It did all the camera switching that we would normally do in a production-room environment—Teams essentially switched to whoever was speaking and whoever had their mic open.”

That automatic switching was a good thing because it made the conversation feel more natural, Schoonover says. It did, however, make it hard for the team to show alternative views, like going full-screen on someone who was talking.

The solution for that was to use the pinning feature in Teams—when someone started speaking in-depth on a topic, the production team would pin their camera feed across the whole screen on a different PC and would use their production-room controller to switch to that view while they spoke. When the speaker was wrapping up, the production team would switch back to the main PC showing the CEO and several other leaders listening.

“That allowed us to switch back and forth between different views like we would during a normal broadcast,” Schoonover says. “It also allowed Satya to control the flow of the meeting—a moderator would read questions coming in from employees on Yammer, he would give his input, and, when needed, he would call on a leader to provide more detail.”

The team used a dedicated PC to pin the event’s sign-language interpreter on-screen for the duration of the Q&A, which allowed them to continuously pipe her into the broadcast no matter which view they switched to.

“I was pleased with how smoothly things went and with how authentic it was,” says Schoonover, who called out Teams’ automatic camera switching as a highlight. “It felt very organic, very natural.”

Cirone agreed, adding that another highlight was that employees got to peek into the homes of the company’s leaders.

“There was something that was very authentic and real about that,” he says. There was some teasing about the libraries and other backgrounds that the leaders were showing—a few were showing alternative backgrounds, a new feature in Teams.

It was all about bringing everyone together. “There’s something very humbling and unifying about how this is happening to all of us, that we‘re all going through this together,” Cirone says.

Delivering the Q&A to employees

Once Schoonover’s team wove the elements of the production together, his team handed it off to the second half of the Microsoft Production Studios, the part of the house responsible for patching the live feed into Yammer. There, employees watched, asked questions, and interacted with each other before, during, and after the event.

“For us, having this be a remote Microsoft Teams meeting didn’t change anything,” says Jeff Tyler, a digital media experience lead for Microsoft Production Studios. “At the end of the day, what came out of our production switching room was the same as always—the only difference was where people were presenting from.”

The team did all of things it normally does, including adding real-time captioning, watching for video lagging, and getting ready to make the session ready for on-demand viewing once the event was complete, says Kristyona Rosin, a webcast and transmission team lead for RUN Studios, the vendor company that supports Microsoft Production Studios.

“We were very prepared for a larger-than-normal audience,” Rosin says. “We normally have about 10,000 employees online during a Q&A, and this time we had more than 22,000, which was a record. Another 13,000 employees watched a video-only live stream.” The event recording was then available to watch on-demand for employees who missed the live show—more than 15,000 employees watched on demand.

Cirone says employees reacted positively to the meeting.

“We had more engagement than we’ve ever had on Yammer,” he says. “Employees asked lots of good questions about the company, about how we’re all working from home, about our role in the crisis, and asking what they could do to help. They were having a lot of interesting and supportive conversations with each other.”

Going forward, Microsoft’s leadership team will continue to use the live events platform to meet and engage with employees for as long as working from home is needed, Cirone says. And Microsoft is continuing to build in new features and experiences to help remote-working employees and customers everywhere connect through live events.

Here are some resources to get started with live events in Microsoft 365 at your company:

• Get a primer on getting started on live events.
• Watch this live events primer video.
• Go here to get a detailed overview of live events.
• Get assistance running your live event.
• Go here for a primer on how admins can get started with both Microsoft Teams and live events meetings.

Here are additional resources to learn more about how Microsoft uses live events internally:

• Learn more about how leaders across Microsoft are using live events in Microsoft 365 to connect with their teams.
• Read this case study on how Microsoft uses live events in Microsoft 365.
• Learn how Microsoft used the live events platform to hold a key global meeting.
• Watch Microsoft’s IT experts talk about how they migrated to live events in Microsoft 365 from Skype Meeting Broadcast.

The post Microsoft’s senior leaders bring employees together during COVID-19 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better together

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each product has its own strengths.

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

Answering thorny questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy collaborating.

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

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

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.

The post Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.