![\"Microsoft](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/ms-digital-technical-stories-300x112.png\")
At Microsoft, we\u2019re using Microsoft 365 to empower our employees to achieve more by driving better teamwork and collaboration in our teams. We\u2019re using core Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, and Viva Engage to support modern work styles and enable continued digital transformation. We\u2019re also deploying Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft and, where appropriate, we\u2019re melding its modules with Microsoft 365 products.<\/p>\n
With Microsoft 365 employees can check in one place for the latest updates, files, and data for their projects and work. As a hub for teamwork, our collaborative toolset empowers our employees to be productive and enables our entire organization to change at the speed of our business.<\/p>\n
The collaboration landscape is changing daily. The average worker is collaborating with more people, more often, and in more dynamic ways. \u00a0They are hybrid or remote and working on a schedule that promotes their wellbeing and allows them to be their most productive. The typical worker has seen several important collaboration changes that affect them and their business, including:<\/p>\n
The change in collaboration isn\u2019t simply about statistical increases. The way our employees collaborate is also changing:<\/p>\n
Our goal, and likely yours too, is to enable workers to embrace modern work styles and increase collaboration by providing tools to meet the needs of our continually changing business.<\/p>\n
Of course, one of the biggest forces we\u2019re dealing with is the way we\u2019ve changed how and where we work. In the past, the pace of business was generally slower. Data was parked in on premises datacenters. Computers were something we used primarily at work, and work was done only from the office. Decisions were made during specific business hours. Our culture revolved around what the individual achieved.<\/p>\n
Today the situation is quite different, and technology is enabling the difference. Worker expectations have changed in many ways:<\/p>\n
Our company culture is focused on employee experience and how we can use teamwork to achieve organizational goals. Our employees want to access their workspace whenever and wherever they need. They are constantly connected, networking, and collaborating, and we reward them for teamwork and the results their teams produce, not the amount of time they spend in the office.<\/p>\n
We constantly assess our organization to better understand the collaborative landscape. We examine the scenarios in which people work together and rely on technology and services. The better we understand how our teams work, the more completely we can enable a collaborative toolset and mindset that empowers them to achieve greater productivity.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve found that collaboration is just as much about culture as it is about technology. Collaboration serves the needs of our people and business. Because people participate in multiple teams simultaneously, each team must establish its own collaboration standards.<\/p>\n
We ask important questions about our teams, including:<\/p>\n
By observing teams, we discovered collaboration patterns that were particularly successful in our organization. For example, agile engineering teams, support functions, sales organizations, communications initiatives, and organizations reporting to a senior leader are patterns that we reference in our training and guidance.<\/p>\n
Productivity extends beyond thinking about technology. It\u2019s about creating flexibility that speaks to the needs of our lines of businesses and employees\u2014helping them achieve what CEO Satya Nadella has set out as a mission for the entire company: \u201cIt is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Microsoft 365 is one of the key contributing technologies in our collaborative environment, and we\u2019re using it to support modern collaboration across our enterprise.<\/p>\n
Our Microsoft 365 environment looks something like this:<\/p>\n
Microsoft 365 provides us with a unified environment for collaboration and teamwork. All services are managed under the same framework and identity management solution. Our data is protected by first-class security and encryption standards, and our collaboration landscape, hosted in the cloud, is more centralized and unified than it ever was on-premises. Additionally, with files and tools based in Microsoft 365, we can easily share with people inside or outside of our company, from wherever we\u2019re working, whenever we need to. Content sharing, shared calendars, and team chat ensure that we\u2019re always in sync with our teams.<\/p>\n
Microsoft 365 gives our business a boost with tools to enable us to build business solutions by extending Microsoft 365 functionality. We\u2019ve built integrations with Microsoft 365 in several ways, including creating bots to answer questions in Teams chats, using a SharePoint site with PowerApps to show data from different data sources, and integrating our data and applications into the Microsoft 365 environment.<\/p>\n
We use each purpose-built application in Microsoft 365 to drive different aspects of collaboration and teamwork.<\/p>\n With these tools coming together in Microsoft 365, our teams get access to holistic solutions when they need them using single team membership across apps and services. What\u2019s unique about teamwork in Microsoft 365 is that all these applications are built on an intelligent fabric that uses the capabilities and strengths of each application to support and supplement the other applications.<\/p>\n Teamwork is a key element of empowering connection at Microsoft. Teams brings together tools, information, and communication methods for seamless connection and flow. Microsoft Teams has revolutionized hybrid collaboration, teamwork, and productivity within the Microsoft 365 universal toolkit.<\/p>\n Several of our support teams now manage support incidents within Teams. They can pin real-time dashboards with relevant data, integrate alerts from monitoring systems, and quickly bring new participants up to speed on issues. Because Teams is familiar across the company, using these functions is fast and fluid, setup has low overhead, and incidents can be resolved more quickly.<\/p>\n Teams also integrates with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, the Planner task management app, Stream video portal, and even Power BI\u2014so employees have the information and tools they need. Team members can also include other apps and services in their workspaces for the team and organization. Frequently, engineering teams include integration between Visual Studio projects and channels so that work items can be easily discussed with people who may not use Visual Studio.<\/p>\n Teams, in combination with the rest of Microsoft 365, helps you stay connected with your work groups.\u00a0 It empowers our employees to engage with each other and the business in a way that transforms our organization for the better, moving us closer to fully realizing digital transformation.<\/p>\n SharePoint and OneDrive for Business are the source for our file storage, page, business process, and sharing needs.<\/p>\n We use SharePoint as the primary repository for storing files and data for collaboration at Microsoft. Files, data, and processes that contain corporate info, belong to teams or projects, and anything else that gets shared internally are all stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.<\/p>\n Office 365 groups are the primary vehicle for managing access in SharePoint with simplicity. A group-connected SharePoint site grants access to group members by default. Site ownership and permissions can also include a wide collection of people. Check-in workflows can be created to assign a document to the next person in line when a reviewer checks it in. If a document is important to the success of a project, it\u2019s important that team members can access it, even if the original author is no longer working on the project. In SharePoint Online, permissions are granted on a site basis, with the option to uniquely share or restrict individual documents. If an employee is a member of the group for the SharePoint site, they typically have access to documents stored on the site. Although they can share outside of the group, the group is the standard definition for access.<\/p>\n With SharePoint, our teams get a collaborative advantage, and supporting that collaboration becomes much simpler within the Microsoft 365 framework. For example:<\/p>\n We use SharePoint as the center for internal document storage and document sharing, but it also hosts all our internal \u00a0sites. The MSW homepage\u2014our company intranet homepage\u2014gets about 1.3 million clicks per month, and the site is used by nearly 163,000 employees per month. Employees go there to get company news, learn about major announcements and events, find other internal sites, and search internally. Not only is the MSW site the busiest portal at Microsoft, it\u2019s where we keep core employee content. Employees can find everything including campus maps, expense forms, and meal card balances. It\u2019s the gateway to all other major company sites that also run on SharePoint.<\/p>\n Data can easily be lost or stolen when employees work from files saved to their own devices. Our employees work from the cloud because it\u2019s more secure, it makes collaboration far easier, and we can apply policies and governance.<\/p>\n We encourage our employees to use Microsoft OneDrive for Business as their individual file library for personal work files and files that don\u2019t need to be shared with others or that don\u2019t contain corporate data. OneDrive for Business safely stores your files in the cloud. By default, files saved to OneDrive for Business are private, unless you place them in a shared folder or intentionally share them. OneDrive for Business makes it easy to access and sync your files from anywhere on any device.<\/p>\n OneDrive for Business is a good choice for collaborating and sharing your files, even if they have a limited scope or lifecycle. For example, an employee creates a blog post and wants a colleague to review it before it\u2019s posted. In this case, we expect to use the document once without needing additional storage or context information. We want our employees to use OneDrive for Business for all personal file storage scenarios.<\/p>\n Here are some advantages of using OneDrive for Business from an IT perspective:<\/p>\n Viva Engage is the Microsoft social network that supports broad, online community and connection. People use communities to share knowledge, ask questions, and discuss topics with people that span organizations, roles, and locations. With storyline, individuals have a personal space to share their ideas, interests, and observations. Leaders post announcements to their audiences that enable recipients across Microsoft to react, comment, and share their own perspectives.<\/p>\n With Leadership Corner in Viva Engage, you can get to know your leaders and what they\u2019re thinking about. This platform lets you follow their latest posts, discover the communities they’ve joined, and attend their AMAs to ask them questions directly. Leadership corner provides tools for learning about your leaders and building lasting connections with them.<\/p>\n Viva Engage also provides an open forum for our events where attendees can ask questions and comment about a live broadcast. Presenters and other participants can read these comments as they\u2019re posted and respond in real time.<\/p>\n To ensure that CEO broadcasts reflect what\u2019s on the minds of our employees, we use Viva Engage in advance to solicit employee input, and speakers can address those curated questions or concerns during the meeting and in later follow-ups.<\/p>\n Overall, Viva Engage transforms the way our employees collaborate by breaking down the barriers that location and role have historically presented. Viva Engage conversations don\u2019t have these boundaries. People, groups, and teams who wouldn\u2019t normally be able to engage in conversation can connect through Viva Engage.<\/p>\n Click here to learn more about transforming employee engagement with Microsoft Viva Engage.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n We also have unified, suite-wide intelligence with Microsoft Graph<\/a>. Graph maps the connection of people and content to surface insights and is a key technology powering Microsoft 365 Copilot<\/a>. For example, in most places where you type a name in Outlook 365, the autocomplete uses Graph to suggest people based on the \u201cpeople I work with\u201d edge. This same technique powers organizationally relevant suggestions in Copilot. Specific examples of this include:<\/p>\n At Microsoft, the official decision to implement a change like Microsoft 365 adoption is typically made at the organizational or executive level. However, the impetus for change is often a response to the changing business needs of our people or organization. We have diverse groups of people who need to work in different ways. The culture has shifted to work in place, hybrid work, and asynchronous work. With Microsoft 365, our employees are encouraged to support their peers and teammates and build from each other\u2019s work, and they\u2019re rewarded when they do. It\u2019s a core attribute of driving cultural change at Microsoft.<\/p>\n We want each employee at Microsoft to work seamlessly, securely, and feel connected with colleagues and leadership wherever they are.<\/p>\n During morning coffee.<\/strong> Use Outlook to check email and manage your calendar and use Teams to view chats and stay up to date on projects. Use Office Apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint to create or review documents.<\/p>\n From your home office.<\/strong> Use Teams to host or join personal meetings or to chat with voice and text. Use Stream to watch live meetings, and Outlook to connect to a meeting from your email or calendar.<\/p>\n Meet at the office.<\/strong> Use Teams to host personal meetings with smaller groups and manage notes and actions in Teams channels. Use Teams meetings to host or join conference room meetings using conference room hardware.<\/p>\n Collaborate with your team.<\/strong> Use Teams for chat, video, screen sharing, and file coauthoring within a team. Use Office apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint to create or review documents and share documents from the cloud. Use Planner or Project to track actions.<\/p>\n Connect across the company.<\/strong> Use Viva Engage to see for organizational updates, share knowledge, and find answers. Use SharePoint for communication sites and news for broad groups of stakeholders.<\/p>\n Individual needs are at the heart of change, but we also recognize the need for a structured, documented process for people who manage the change. We provide a common toolset for them to use and help them to scale up to organization-wide adoption. We use four pillars of change management to help us from start to finish. These pillars are applied repeatedly within Microsoft as technology capabilities and business needs evolve. The four pillars are:<\/p>\n Harnessing employee ingenuity is critical to the overall success and relevance of a business. Working together, people generate more ideas and feel more connected to their work, which improves engagement and retention. Our employees need to have resources and tools available wherever they go. To meet the needs of remote and hybrid workplaces, we\u2019ve used Microsoft 365 to streamline communication, improve collaboration, and get more done together.<\/p>\n However, successful collaboration with Microsoft 365 is not just technology adoption; it represents a change in behavior. Microsoft 365 is more than a product\u2014it\u2019s a fundamentally different way of working. The core priority is people. We found that adoption was as much about social and cultural changes and challenges as it was about technology and tool implementation. Adopting Microsoft 365 for collaboration is a different journey than we\u2019ve asked our people to take in the past. With Microsoft 365, we\u2019ve established nine fundamental shifts in behavior that we ask our users to embrace:<\/p>\n To accomplish this journey, we needed to educate people by managing change and offering training that focused as much on behaviors as on product capabilities.<\/p>\n Because Microsoft 365 is hosting our complete collaboration environment, we\u2019re serious about protecting our data, organization, and users in Microsoft 365. Our compliance and security landscape in Microsoft 365 relies on our identity and access strategy, which governs all of the processes and tools we use throughout the identity lifecycle for employees, supplier staff, and partners. As a cloud-first company, we use features in the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security suite, powered by Microsoft Azure and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), the default directory solution for Microsoft\u00a0365, along with on-premises identity and access management solutions to enable our users to be securely productive from anywhere.<\/p>\n Microsoft 365 supports three identity models that support a variety of identity scenarios. Depending on how an organization wants to manage identities, it can use a cloud identity model, federated identity model, or the synchronized identity model. We use Azure AD Connect to integrate our on-premises directories with Azure AD. It gives users a single identity in Microsoft 365, Azure, and software as a service (SaaS) applications that are integrated with Azure AD. We use multi-factor authentication to protect our users and ensure the safety of our data.<\/p>\n Collaboration at Microsoft involves a huge amount of external teamwork. We collaborate and share with industry peers, partners, and vendors. For secure external collaboration, we use identity in Microsoft 365 to verify that external collaborators are who they say they are, and then we use that identity in Microsoft 365 groups to grant access only to resources needed for collaboration.<\/p>\n External collaboration could be something as simple as providing read-only access to a single file, or it could be as complex as an external identity that is part of our Microsoft 365 group membership and participates in teamwork activity in SharePoint, Viva Engage, and Teams.<\/p>\n A big part of external collaboration is finding a reliable and secure way to let the outside in but also to ensure that collaboration and control over our data happens on the inside as well. We want our data stored on our tenancy, under our control. Rather than circulating files outside of our Azure tenancy for external collaborators to view and work on, we keep the files within our tenancy and invite collaborators in so that the work they do and the data they access is within the scope of our security, monitoring, and governance practices. When we have this type of control, we can selectively allow external collaborators the roles and permissions they need.<\/p>\n We have numerous other controls that span our Office 365 groups\u2014including eDiscovery, general data protection regulation (GDPR), multi-geographical controls, and data loss prevention (DLP). They help us rationalize security and compliance and underpin our collaboration environment in Microsoft 365.<\/p>\n We\u2019re changing the way that people work and contribute to teams.<\/p>\n Modern collaboration with Microsoft 365 is just as much about cultural change as it is the adoption of new tools, and many of the lessons we\u2019ve learned focus on the benefits of enterprise collaboration and teamwork when it\u2019s implemented across the organization and driven by executive sponsorship. Here are some of the most important lessons we\u2019ve learned:<\/p>\n We\u2019re using Microsoft 365 to empower our employees to achieve more by driving better teamwork and collaboration in our teams. Microsoft 365 services provide a unified, extensible framework within which we can achieve our business goals, support modern workstyles, and enable continued digital transformation. Microsoft 365 empowers our entire organization to collaborate and change at the speed of our business.<\/p>\n At Microsoft, we\u2019re using Microsoft 365 to empower our employees to achieve more by driving better teamwork and collaboration in our teams. We\u2019re using core Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, and Viva Engage to support modern work styles and enable continued digital transformation. We\u2019re also deploying Microsoft Viva internally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":11791,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":true,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[93,597],"coauthors":[646],"class_list":["post-11789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-collaboration","tag-employee-experience","program-microsoft-digital-technical-stories","m-blog-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2023\/07\/8120_image001.jpg\")
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Establishing a hub for teamwork in Microsoft Teams<\/h4>\n
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Sharing information using SharePoint and OneDrive for Business<\/h4>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2023\/07\/8120_image002.jpg\")
Using SharePoint to collaborate within a team<\/h4>\n
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Protecting enterprise files with the cloud<\/h4>\n
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Collaborating and connecting with Viva Engage<\/h4>\n
Adding intelligence with Microsoft Graph<\/h4>\n
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Enabling cultural change<\/h3>\n
Making change a practical reality<\/h4>\n
Setting up a structure for change<\/h4>\n
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Viva Engage introduces a fresh employee experience, fostering connections among people throughout the company, regardless of their location or work hours, to ensure inclusivity and engagement for all. The Viva Engage app, integrated into Microsoft Teams, empowers organizations to cultivate a sense of community, ignite engagement with leadership, leverage knowledge and insights, and establish personal networks.<\/div>\n<\/li>\nEnabling behavior and cultural change for collaboration<\/h3>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2023\/07\/8120_image003.jpg\")
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Managing compliance and security in immersive collaboration<\/h3>\n
Using Microsoft 365 identity models<\/h4>\n
Enabling external collaboration while protecting our data<\/h4>\n
![\"Key](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/key-takeaways-300x74.png\")
\nEnterprise collaboration is about culture change and empowering people to work together to achieve the best productivity results. We\u2019re moving from a culture of competition to one of cooperation. The tools we use play an important role in this change, but we need to pay attention to behaviors as much as we pay attention to tools.<\/p>\n\n
![\"Related](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/related_links-300x81.png\")
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