Microsoft launches Adoption Score to help businesses get the best from their Microsoft 365 investment.

Microsoft has released another analytics dashboard for the Microsoft 365 admin centre called Adoption Score. This latest AI driven insights dashboard is designed to assist IT and Customer Success Teams to ensure their employees are making the most from the core productivity and collaboration tools across Microsoft 365. Adoption Score replaces the  Productivity Score dashboard whilst adding a bunch of new features and controls that are designed to help enhance effectiveness and efficiency.

The anonymised metrics in Adoption Score help IT admins understand and optimize Microsoft 365 usage patterns in support of their digital transformation journey. The new name reflects the new product truth and provides clearer differentiation from other solutions that offer insights for business leaders and managers.

Microsoft.

Microsoft also indicated that they plan to add more functionality over time with the long term of aim of helping  IT (and / or their support partners or MSPs) ensure they are making the most out of their Microsoft 365 investment. Also included are lots of privacy controls to ensure organisations can adhere to their user-level privacy commitments which helps ensure it isn’t used as a spying or workplace surveillance tool.

Adoption Score shows how Microsoft 365 software gets used in an organisations and then offers “recommended actions” for more efficient use of those products. It also has a scoring service across eight categories that can be compared with similar sized organisations.

Microsoft 365 Adoption Score

Data is obtained and anonamises using Microsoft 365 application use data from activity across “Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Yammer and Skype.

Privacy

Microsoft claims that Adoption Score only shows “anonymised metrics.” The announcement stated that “Adoption Score is backed by Microsoft’s continued commitment to user-level privacy — meaning no one in a customer’s organisation can use Adoption Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365”, meaning you can’t identity individuals in the reports.

New Features

One of the new features is called “Time Trends” which will also soon be part of the Adoption Score Tool, which will help organisations better  understand historical data insights across the business and departments. This new “Time Trends will be added to each people experience category across Content Collaboration, Meetings, Teamwork, Mobility and Communication. Data will now be analysed from up to 180 days of historic data (but can be customised).

The tools will enable IT to better understand how a particular behaviour or insight, such as the response rate for new email responses, @mentions and Comms via Teams for example has evolved over the last 30, 90 or 180 days which enables IT or success mangers to understand the meaning behind the tends, helping them see whether they are close to achieving set goals for the adoption of modern comms tools (over just reply to all type email chains).

Availability

The Adoption Score tool is available now (rolling out) to all commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions and can be accessed by Global admins (and then delayed as needed). On initial access, IT are required to approve both Adoption Score analytics and the people experiences category in order to access the Time trend data.

Viva Engage aims to improve company culture and human connector at work.

During Inspire 2022, Microsoft announced that they were intending to expand Microsoft Viva with a new Engage module. As of now, Viva Engage is generally available and rolling out.

What is Microsoft Viva

Viva Engage is the latest component of Microsoft’s Employee Experience platform, Viva. Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, sales, company goals, resources, and insights in the flow of work to foster a culture that empowers employees and teams to be their best from anywhere. It consists of Viva Insights, Viva Learning, Viva Topics, Viva Goals and now Viva Engage.

What is Viva Engage?

In short, Viva Engage is an Enterprise Social experience that allows employees to interact,  share news, ideas and stories as well as to develop relationships, establish internal connections, and at the same time provide an opportunity for people to learn from each other all from within Microsoft Teams,  helping to foster a better company culture

The purpose of Viva Engage is to “Connect everyone at your organisation through employee communities and conversations using Viva Engage, a Microsoft Teams app powered by Yammer“.

Viva Engage from Microsoft

Microsoft Viva Engage is not entirely new, but the name is! It is an modern version of the Yammer Communities app that’s been around for sometime.  It builds upon the social and communication capabilities of Yammer and Microsoft 365 apps and services, Viva Engage also beings new features and capabilities designed to make the experience more seamless than before. 

Viva Engage has a personalised Home page feature the brings users into a social landing page, where they can see news and posts from their connections. Like Facebook and Linked In for example, the feed learns and shows content that is most relevant based on machine learning and personal preferences.

Also within Viva Engage is a Communities Hub along with a list of recommended communities (if you are sed to using Yammer this will be familiar).

Viva Engage Stories

So what’s the connection between Viva Engage and Yammer?

Viva Engage is a new app, integrated in Teams, that surfaces existing and new employee experiences powered by Yammer services. Viva Engage delivers high-value employee experiences including community building, leadership engagement, knowledge sharing, and self-expression. The Viva Engage app integrates these experiences into Teams, and introduces new features including storyline and stories.

This means that for organisations that use Yammer today, these new Viva Engage features will also appear in Yammer web, desktop and mobile apps. So whether a user visits to Yammer.com, uses one of the popular Yammer mobile apps for iOS or Android, or experiences the Viva Engage app in Teams, they will see the same content and generally access effectively the same feature set.

New features coming too.

New to Viva Engage (and coming in the next few weeks) is the Storyline and Stories features, which have been built to enhance engagement among employees. With this, employees will be able to share their thoughts widely with colleagues through conversations and videos, similar to the experience in Instagram Stories.

The dedicated Storylines tab will get populated with content from colleagues but also features popular and trending posts from across the network. Employees can also use the ‘follow’ feature to follow other employees making simple to get updates and news from persons of interest.

Licensing and Costs

The new Viva Engage app, storyline and stories, are available to any organisation/user with a Yammer license, which is on by default for all Microsoft 365 commercial customers.

Conclusion

Viva Engage is not a new application, it is instead a partial re-brand of Yammer for Microsoft Teams with new modern features and deeper integration across Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Since Teams apps are the universal apps for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem Viva Engage will also replace the Yammer Communities app that is available for Outlook and Teams making Yammer more available from a variety of locations inside Microsoft 365.


To find out more about Viva Engage follow the link to Microsoft’s dedicated page.

Surface Headphones 2+ now Teams Certified without a dongle!

For users / owners of Surface Headphones 2+ (for Business), Microsoft are rolling out a new firmware update which enables the devices to be Microsoft Teams® certified using native Bluetooth® without a dongle.

Image (c) Microsoft

This means users of Surface Headphones 2+ will be able to depend on reliable connections during calls and interact with intuitive touch control with the convenience of not having to worry about the dongle – something which will improve productivity and ease of use for employees that (like me) often navigate different workspaces and devices for hybrid work and everyday life.

This is made possible by Microsoft leveraging the improvement in Bluetooth connectivity directly via the Surface companion app for Windows and Mac desktop clients.

Specific other vendor devices will, in the future, also get firmware updates to support native Bluetooth stack certification support.

Surface Headphones

For more information about Surface Headphones, you can check out the Microsoft product pages here.

What is Microsoft Digital Contact Centre Platform all about?

Microsoft and Nuance Contact Centre

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of the digital contact center has grown more vital for organisations to managing the increasing expectations of customer experience and excellence. Microsoft have had many of the core building blocks of a contact center platform for while with products like Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which was very focused on the support agent and customer experience … but it didn’t provide the actual engagement channels – which required third party services.

Despite the increasing importance of contact centers however, Microsoft had truly developed or built their own “true contact center” capability despite their prime competition in the UC&C space (namely Zoom and Cisco) have had Contact Centre in their UC&C portfolio.

Until now that is…

At Microsoft Inspire (Microsoft’s annual global partner conference), Microsoft unveiled their new Digital Contact Centre Platform which combines Dynamics 365, Nuance, Teams, Power Platform, and Azure to form a new modern contact centre solution that aims to engage customers through a blend of voice, video, and other digital engagement channels and plays to their strength and breadth of their “platform strategy approach”.

“In today’s digital world, brand reputation is synonymous with customer experience, including the quality of customer care. Consumers expect effortless, consistent, and secure experiences across any point of contact they choose—in fact, their brand perception and customer loyalty depend on it. With the stakes this high, companies need a comprehensive yet flexible solution to modernise their customer care experience. We are thrilled to introduce the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, an open, extensible, and collaborative contact centre solution designed to deliver seamless customer journeys.”

Charles Lamanna | CVP | Business Applications and Platform | Microsoft

Great….so what is it?

Despite Microsoft adding support for Teams voice channels into Dynamics 365 last year, it’s really their acquisition of AI-based communications giant Nuance in March which has allowed them to take the next step into developing their own fully fledged Digital Contact Centre solution not only adding the omni channel experience, but also providing support agents with everything from recommended responses to live sentiment analysis across all channels.

Microsoft describe their new Digital Contact Centre Platform, as an open, extensible, and collaborative contact centre solution designed to deliver seamless customer journeys. The platform brings together a comprehensive yet flexible solution for contact centres, delivering best-in-class AI that powers self-service experiences, live customer engagements, collaborative agent experiences, business process automation, advanced telephony, and fraud prevention capabilities.

Microsoft say that “the real USP in their offering is that by leveraging their core suites of platform, enables organisation to capture additional customer information that might otherwise fall through the cracks” | Pete Daderko | Director of Teams Product Marketing.

The viewpoint is that since Microsoft already over 250 million people using Teams as their primary work tool, then “It’s really only natural that organisations would want to take the productivity or collaboration platform that they’re already using and use it to better serve customers.

MSFT Digital Contact Centre is built on Teams, Dynamics, Power Platform and Nuance.

With the combination of Teams telecommunications infrastructure, Dynamics 365 customer agent experience and Nuance AI, Microsoft believes it is uniquely placed to be able to address the three main pillars of a contact center – Infrastructure, agent experience and true conversational, contextual based AI.

The Competition

This is an interesting one. Microsoft of course aren’t the only vendor to take this approach. After the failed FiveNine acquisition last year, Zoom later went on to Solvvy to bolster their own AI capabilities into their contact centre solution.

Still, Microsoft knows it won’t replace every customer’s contact center. Recognizing that very few customers will switch their entire tech stacks to Microsoft overnight, the company plans to play nice with others (for now).

Microsoft, despite the extent of their cloud platforms have always touting the open ecosystem approach to bolstering “gaps” or “specialist” areas in their portfolio – with contact centre being a big example. They have continually addressed the answer to the question of “when will Microsoft build its own native contact centre” around the extensive integrations with leading contact centre providers such as Genesys, Avaya, NICE inContact and others. As Microsoft move into the next stage of their own development, they say that “When we called it the digital contact center platform, we called it that very deliberately — the platform piece — because we think integrations and interoperability and being open is so key“.

“Nuance has a rich history and legacy of connecting to really any kind of CRM, or any contact center infrastructure or contact center as a service provider,” is a key part of that open platform strategy”

Charles Lamanna | CVP | Business Apps and Platform | Microsoft

Summary

This is a big investment space and with cloud penetration still generally low across the legacy contact center industry, which still relies on a single mode / voice, on-premises infrastructure and limited connectivity to CRM and other LOB apps, there’s tremendous opportunity for Microsoft and their partners to help its customers move from on-premises to the cloud. It will just have to beat out the likes of Zoom, Salesforce, and others with a longer history in the market.

What do you think – please leave your answers in the comments.

Should every organisation be considering Windows 365?

Windows 365 has just celebrated its first birthday – but what is it and why is Microsoft betting big on Windows 365 to help improve the employee experience, tighten security, and provide better agility for employees?

Businesses globally are once again being hit head on with challenges unrivalled in recent business history. Employee churn-rates are at record levels presenting unique business challenges, whilst the continuing shift in the workforce from centralised offices to home working has increased the number of “work locations” exponentially. Combined with the on-going global supply chain shortages, and logistical difficulties in procuring, preparing, and shipping new devices to employees makes onboarding new employees more challenging than ever. The continuing need to provide employees with a secure, professional, corporate desktop environment is pressuring IT to make decisions that can impact process, security, governance and above all employee satisfaction.

Microsoft are betting big with Windows 365, since it can help organisations significantly reduce the time it takes to provide new employees with access to their corporate desktop environment from days or weeks to minutes without compromising security. What’s more, unlike traditional on-premises Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments, Windows 365 (which is a new category of cloud computing, known as Cloud PC, simplifies the entire provisioning process and user experience.

In conjunction with the Enterprise Security Group, Microsoft recently carried out a TEI study which found that by leveraging Windows 365 Cloud PC, organisations can significantly lower the cost of providing access to an organisation’s end user computing environment whilst improving security and employee satisfaction. The ESG report also revealed that Windows 365 can provide a “typical organisation” with an overall annual benefit of up $7,271 per user for small businesses and up to $6,765 per user for companies with over 1,000 employees.

What is Windows 365?

In short, Windows 365 unlocks a new category of hybrid personal computing, called “Cloud PC” that delivers Windows from the cloud. It aims to provide a hybrid approach to providing client computing by utilising a cloud service that is not tied to any specific hardware.

Image (c) Microsoft

Windows 365 combines the power and security of Windows 10 or Windows 11 with the scalability and versatility of cloud to provide a personal, reliable, and familiar work/desktop environment on any supported physical device. If want to see it in action, you can head over to Microsoft’s YouTube video here.

Similar in concept, but different to VDI technology, Cloud PCs are one of the newest Microsoft cloud solutions to come to market. Cloud PCs are optimised for business and user agility, are highly secure, persistent to the user and are billed on a per-user, per-month model that simplifies the cost and infrastructure complexity of client computing environments and on-premises VDI solutions.

The report by ESG validated that Windows 365 provides capabilities that address nine of the ten business challenges identified by IT leaders.

Source: ESG Complete Survey Results, End-user Computing Trends, February 2022.

SIMPLE, COST EFFECTIVE, POWERFUL, SECURE – Windows 365 works by giving each user a dedicated Cloud PC (of a chosen specification) that runs their own individual Windows 10 or Windows 11 desktop environment while providing an extremely simple-to-manage ecosystem all managed via Microsoft’s Endpoint Manager toolset which is used to manage the rest of the physical desktop or laptop estate. For users, this means they can bring their existing device and instantly be presented with a familiar and powerful end-user computing experience either while they “wait” for their replacement or physical device or instead of waiting for IT to procure, provision, and image a new corporate device. In turn the ESG report finds that Cloud PC technology provides an effective solution for organisations of any size and sector, which are working to meet the complex needs of a hybrid or remote workforce.

Benefits of Windows 365 Cloud PC

Cost Predictability

The ESG report, concludes that Windows 365 delivers a combination of lowered costs, eliminated costs, and a predictable fixed cost model which can provides significant financial benefit in several areas.

  • Lower costs: Shifting to Windows 365 lowers and eliminates costs in several areas, including VDI licensing, server operating systems, remote desktop licensing, storage, management, power and cooling, license management, VDI management, procurement, and end-of-life costs.
  • Fixed-price model: Windows 365 Cloud PC pricing is based on a simple per-user, per-month model which that allows organisations to match computing and storage needs to individual user requirements. There is value in being able to project costs in business. Most VDI pricing models are based on consumption, which, while this may initially seem like an advantage, most organisation often find that their monthly charges extend far beyond projections when usage spikes unexpectedly.
  • Ability to cross-charge services: Organisations that charge internal or external business groups fees for licenses, hardware, or services will find that the Windows 365 predictable cost model makes it much easier to allocate specific costs in a granular and predictable way, especially when compared to the capital-intensive purchases needed to facilitate on-premises VDI or DaaS.

Business and User Agility

With employee churn-rates are at record levels, continuing delays in supply chains and with more employees, contractors and temporary staff being permanently remote, getting new employees up and running as quickly as possible is a big challenge. Windows 365 allows companies to provide highly secure Cloud PCs running Windows 11 on their device within minutes verses hours, days, or weeks.

  • Time to employee enablement: The time from when a new employee, temporary worker, or contractor is hired to when they are fully onboarded with their corporate device often takes time, leads to the employee getting a second-hand device, or means it delays their onboarding time. Leveraging Cloud PC technology can, however, means that organisations can now provide new starters with a new Windows desktop is under an hour, allowing them to security access their work environment from any supported device that the new worker wishes to use, even if it is only a temporary situation.
  • Enablement of temporary/seasonal workers – The cost in both money and time to empower short-term workers with a company work environment is often high, and either inhibits an organisation’s willingness to employ temporary works or worse, means they are forced to compromise on security due to the time to procure and provision a device. With Windows 365, temporary workers can quickly be provisioned so they have immediate access to the corporate environment while safe in the knowledge that all intellectual property stays secured within the corporate environment, and that the Cloud PC can be immediately removed at the end of the contract period.
  • Efficient IT Management – When compared to the effort required in procuring, preparing, and delivering laptops to users or even configuring and deploying virtual desktops with traditional VDI platforms, deployment of Cloud PC technology like Windows 365 can result in a 46% reduction in IT effort.
  • Ability to use any device – Windows 365 allows IT to provide workers with a highly secure, Windows 11 desktop on any supported device even though the host device may not be capable of natively running the OS. This is also great for “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) scenarios for employees who may just be starting or have shifted to working from home or short-term workers such as interns, contractors, and consultants.
  • Increased ability to react quicky to seasonal demand – The ability to get a secure, corporate desktop to users quickly is one of the barriers to rapid enablement. Windows 365 Cloud PCs empower businesses to immediately create and decommission desktops to react to opportunities that might be ignored in other DaaS or VDI environments.
  • Equality with the employees – The mindset of the workforce has changed from “May I have a job?” to an attitude of “What are you willing to do to keep me as an employee?”. Treating all employees as equals and providing them with a premium, professional-grade work environment is two of the key criteria for ensuring employee satisfaction. With Windows 365, employees can access a highly secure, personalized Windows 11 work experience through their Cloud PC, regardless of location or available device.
  • Merger and acquisition (M&A) scenarios – Mergers and acquisition events take months, even years, to align the separate work environments that result in an M&A to the same access and security postures. This limits potential cooperation between the entities and delays the full realization of value for the event. The ability to rapidly assimilate the new entities to the existing EUC solution accelerates the time to value and reduces the cost and risk of running parallel environments. The time to combine these two work environments into one can be significantly reduced by using Windows 365 Cloud PC.

Improved Security Posture

Employees and contractors today are working outside conventional environments and often on hardware that was never intended to be on corporate networks. The result is an increased risk of security breaches and data loss and, in many cases, missed business opportunities. ESG has found that organizations that adopt Windows 365 can help enhance their security posture in the following areas.

  • Inclusive, Secure, yet Flexible remote work – Cloud PCs can enable a hybrid workforce in a highly secure manner, even if those workers sometimes or always do their work on devices that aren’t expected to have direct access to corporate networks. Windows 365 Cloud PCs offer a layer of isolation that provides strong protection for the work environment and helps prevent data leakage or loss, with configurable options for how the Cloud PC interact with available physical device.
  • Business continuity and governance – As we know, COVID-19 forced almost every business to suddenly rethink, re-shift and re-prioritise their approach to remote work in a matter of days – doing all they could to get devices, repurpose old kit, leverage employee’s personal devices and ramp up VDI deployments, VPN and remote access tech to enable their people to work, often at the expense of usability, security and governance. As the future of this now unfolds into the hybrid workplace we see before us, technology like Windows 365 becomes a viable BC/DR solution. In short, Windows 365 could now be a vital cornerstone of a business continuity strategy and one that minimises disruption, maintains security and governance and provides a smooth transition for users.
  • Immediate on-boarding and offboarding of employees/contractors – The cost of PC recovery in the event of an offboarded employee or contractor is high and can take weeks in today’s expanded work environment. Interestingly, IBM estimates that 44% of breach events are caused intentionally by disgruntled employees who have been terminated but still have access to company hardware and resources. One of the benefits of Windows 365 is that as well as near instant provisioning, it also allows for the immediate removal of access to the Cloud PC along with all company data.
  • Protection of company data – the FBI estimate that 1 in 10 laptop devices will be lost or stolen during their lifetime, with the risk and financial exposure per event estimated to be between £25,000 and £45,000. Since Windows 365 Cloud PC devices store no data on the host device, a lost or stolen Cloud PC can be limited to the cost of the hardware and can be instantly accessed on another device, meaning no loss of productivity and no risk or loss or theft or corporate data.

What’s your experience of Windows 365?

As always, I’d love to hear your experiences, thoughts, and feedback on this – please leave a comment in the boxes below.


To read more about Windows 365, you can also check out Microsoft’s official FAQ