Microsoft Viva Engage – the new platform for communities and conversations within Microsoft Teams

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Going into 2020, many business leaders were sceptical about remote working, fearing the impact that doing so would have on productivity. But the work from home ‘experiment’ that the pandemic brought has proved to be far more successful than many predicted.

Collaborative technologies like Microsoft Teams, and now Microsoft Viva, have played a vital role in making remote working a viable option for so many organisations, letting teams stay connected digitally, despite being apart physically.

Viva is Microsoft’s new approach to ensuring businesses can provide a consistently good employee experience, while enabling remote and hybrid work. Part of the drive behind Viva is an acknowledgement of the need to help workers stave off the isolation and loss of connection that can occur with these new ways of working. It is also helping business leaders safeguard the mental health of their workers by providing a full picture of how people across their organisation are working, thereby allowing them to tackle the warning signs of stress and burnout before they become a problem.

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How labelling and retention with Microsoft 365 protects your critical information

A graphic depicting a hand holding cloud files

As organisations become increasingly reliant on cloud technology to carry out key day-to-day business, the amount and complexity of data is naturally growing in tandem. Fortunately, Microsoft 365 is now fully-equipped with the tools to ensure your organistaion’s critical data can be kept secure and compliant.

Effectively managing data

There is so much critical information that businesses now need to stay on top of – no longer just good old-fashioned email and documents, but also a multitude of Teams chats, files shared in SharePoint sites and more. This growth in shared information is critical to collaboration, and is paying off with increased operational efficiency.

But it creates a new level of risk for organisations that need to keep up-to-date with ever-evolving industry regulations and internal policies that require content to be preserved for a certain amount of time.

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Internet Explorer end of life – take positive action now to fix legacy applications

A man waves goodbye to Internet Explorer

Support for Internet Explorer 11 ends in June – is your organisation ready?

Many organisations still have applications or group policies that rely on Internet Explorer. From June 15th 2022, Microsoft is no longer supporting this legacy browser, in what is called ‘Internet Explorer end of life’. There are several paths your organisation can take to overcome this challenge.

Internet explorer end of life solution 1 – Pay up

One option to deal with Internet Explorer 11 end-of-life is to contact Microsoft and ask for extended support. However, this means paying through the nose – for most organisations, this option will be too expensive to stomach – and is little more than effectively keeping your IE apps on life support.

Internet explorer end of life solution 1 – Do nothing

Another path is to rely on something called “IE Mode”. This is a new feature provided by Microsoft Edge, the browser which comes with Windows 10 and has replaced Internet Explorer. IE Mode integrates some legacy functionality into the new Edge browser, so your users can browse the internet securely, with the browser opening apps designed for Internet Explorer in a special IE view.

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Using Microsoft Teams as a Platform

Here’s another chance to see our webinar from 2021 on taking Microsoft Teams beyond just meetings and chat.

Using ‘Teams as a platform’ means enabling features throughout Teams that will help you and your colleagues to get more done. Our expert will show you how to extend the Teams platform by using App Templates, and demo how you can integrate Power Platform features using Dataverse for Teams.

Watch the full session recording below and don’t forget to check out our upcoming webinars for more Microsoft 365 insights throughout the year.

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Smart business process automation with AI and Power Automate

Here’s a chance to see our popular webinar from 2021 on Microsoft Power Automate. Discover how AI can take the tedium out of repetitive business tasks, freeing your team up to deliver higher-value work and get more done.

In this expert-led webinar, we introduce Microsoft Power Platform’s robotic process automation functionality. Live demos show you how easy it is to automate tasks with Power Automate and AI Builder.

Watch the full session recording below and don’t forget to check out our upcoming webinars for more Microsoft 365 insight throughout the year.

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What is Productivity score in Microsoft 365?

Productivity Score is a new feature of Microsoft 365 designed to let administrators monitor how productive your organisation is, and the extent to which staff are adopting the platform’s features.

It also lets you benchmark your organisation against others of a similar size. The idea is that you can take action where there has been limited take-up – ideally by taking steps to encourage user adoption, or alternatively by making a positive choice to disable a feature or tool.

Productivity Score is accessed via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. It provides immediate information on how your organisation is using Microosft 365 via metrics including Communication, Meetings, Content Collaboration, Teamwork and Mobility. This data is gathered from across all your users from the last 30 days, and benchmarked against live data from peer businesses of a similar size.

Microsoft 365 Productivity Score

It also provides a small number of metrics relating to the technology side, such as internet connectivity, and whether users have the latest updates installed. This helps admins ensure users are getting the best possible technology experience.

Each of the eight categories is given a score out of 100, which also provides you an overall organisational score out of 800. Admins can use this data about how Microsoft 365 is being used to make better-informed decisions.

Privacy concerns quelled

Initially, Microsoft 365 Productivity Score included statistics for individual named users throughout your organisation. You could even download a spreadsheet showing precisely how much each individual, named user had used each Microsoft 365 feature in the last 28 days.

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What is SharePoint Syntex and how much does it cost?

Microsoft SharePoint Syntex, the first product to come out of Microsoft’s larger Project Cortex, is now available under general release. But what is it, how does it work, and how much does it cost?

Syntex takes advantge of the advanced AI and machine learning coming out of Project Cortex to automatically categorise and classify documents based on models set up by the user. Using these models, Syntex can extract specific data and apply it as metadata to documents, as well as applying Sensitivity and Retention labels for information protection.

SharePoint Syntex lets users create two types of model: Form Processing and Document Understanding. The difference between the two is that Form Processing extracts values from a structured form, while Document Understanding is trained to pick out information from an unstructured document.

Document Understanding with Syntex

To implement a Document Understanding model, a you first need to provision a Content Center. A Content Center is a SharePoint site that’s used to create and store the different document models, as well as to apply those models to your Document Libraries.

SharePoint Syntex Content Center
SharePoint Syntex Content Center

When you have identified a document type you wish to model – such as Statements of Work, CVs/resumés or Purchase Orders – you can create the new model in the Content Center. On creation, the default action is to create a new Content Type; however, you can change this to use an existing Content Type if you have one already set up in your Content Type Hub.

Training a Syntex model

After creating the model, you need to train it by adding in some example files. Syntex only requires five positive examples and one negative example, but more is always better if possible. Once the example files have been uploaded, explanations need to be created alongside them to train the model. The model can then be tested within the Content Center.

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Changes to Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Stream
Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Stream was launched just over three years ago as the service to replace Office 365 Video, providing corporate video streaming and sharing video capabilities.

In October 2020, Microsoft announced that Stream would be much better integrated with Microsoft 365 to provide ‘fast, intelligent video’ capabilities for all users. So, what does this mean in practice?

Classic Stream vs New Stream

In terms of terminology there is now ‘Classic’ Stream, which is what every customer has now.  New Stream is the future service and there will be a transition period where customers are switched from Classic to New.

Although the user impact of New Stream may not be enormous, it is a large technical change from Microsoft’s point of view with a complete rebuilding of the Stream video service in aggressive timelines.

From a Microsoft 365 administration point of view, the primary change is that New Stream will use OneDrive or SharePoint to store videos (as an MP4 file) rather than the separate Stream service. A Stream video will therefore be treated in the same way as any other file being stored in SharePoint/OneDrive.

Changes to the Microsoft Stream landscape
Changes to the Microsoft Stream landscape

SharePoint will be used where a meeting recording is within a Microsoft 365 Group / Teams channel.  Where the recording is not linked to a group, the organisers OneDrive will be used.

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