Intro and demo of Microsoft Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio Logo

Microsoft has recently unveiled the introduction of its new Copilot Studio platform, aiming to empower Microsoft 365 organisations to build their own generative artificial intelligence (AI) ‘copilot’ assistants.

Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2023 this month, Copilot Studio was officially announced alongside a plethora of other updates (and new Copilots), as part of their ongoing efforts to enhance and expand artificial intelligence capabilities across their core product offerings.

With Copilot Studio, users will be able to efficiently create, test, and deploy independent copilots and custom GPTs, providing them with a seamless experience in harnessing the potential of AI technology.

Copilot Studio exposes a full end-to-end lifecycle for customisations and standalone copilots within a single pane of glass meaning you can build, deploy, analyse, and manage all from within the same Web experience….and since it’s a software as a service (SaaS), everything you create is live instantly.

Jared Spataro | Head of Modern Work & Bus Apps | Microsoft.

The announcement of Microsoft Copilot Studio follows the roll-out of a similar DIY copilot creation platform from OpenAI last week called GPT Store. Copilot essentially replaces Power Virtual Agents and is available to try now.

What does Microsoft Copilot Studio do?

Microsoft Copilot Studio leverages low-code, no code and provides a web-based platform that completely transforms the way Microsoft 365 customers users approach application development and extension. Of course, one of the key advantages of Copilot Studio is its seamless integration with the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem and the Microsoft Graph – enabling developers to easily leverage existing data and tools within their organisation, streamlining the development process and maximising productivity. Copilot Studio, like Power Platform is designed for professional developers or users new to AI application development – providing a comprehensive set of tools and resources to support your journey.

Copilot Studio makes it easy to design and prototype AI applications and offers a wide range of templates and pre-built components, empowering even non-technical users to create innovative solutions.

Copilot Studio also brings robust testing capabilities, including integrated debugging tools and simulation environments to help developers easily identify and address any issues before deploying their applications.

Once the AI app is built and tested, Copilot Studio provides a simple deployment process. It provides seamless integration with Microsoft 365 services that allow IT to publish the application to your Microsoft 365 cloud environment or share it with specific users or teams.

How to build your first Copilot in Copilot Studio (follow along).

Once you have signed up for a trial of copilot (it’s in preview), getting started is easy. To login, simply go to Microsoft Copilot Studio

Step 1: Build my Copilot. The easiest way to start is to follow the wizard and point Copilot Studio at a website. For this example, I have used my children’s school.

There are advanced options which include the ability to dive straight into existing data sets and experiences that you have created in Power Platform, but for simplicity, I am following the wizard.

Step 2: Explore the interface: From here you can then see the options expand. You can go straight to the Generative AI Chatbot and start to test it based on the website you have linked it too, or start looking at the options below which include the ability to:

  • Create Custom Topics for your Copilot.
  • Create Plugins and Actions to connect to data that is outside the website.
  • Extend the Microsoft 365 Copilot with data connectors and plugins to your other data.

Step 3: Customise the Generative AI settings: I’m going to click on the “Go to Generative AI” and customise the “sensitivity” of Copilot (I have set mine to medium). I can also further customisations such as adding additional websites for indexing or even upload specific files. The Generative AI model uses the Azure Open AI service. Here I have added another website to index.

Step 4: Testing my Copilot. I can now quickly test my Copilot out by asking a question. In this example I am going to ask it about the schools in the Academy Trust and then dig a little more into the school he attends.

Step 5: Adding Custom Topics: By default, you don’t have much control over the data that comes with the generative answers. This is where topics come into play. These allow you to add in specific topics that you want the bots to be able to speak or answer that have not come automatically from the data, websites, databases or documents you have connected in.

Step 6: Publishing your Copilot: To Publish your Copilot, you have a few options. You can publish to a website (either your own or one can be created for you), to Teams or other locations. To do this, you first need to navigate to Settings –> Channels and choose where you wish to publish your Copilot. For this example, I have chosen a Demo Website.

Once you’ve done that (you can pick multiple), head on over Publish menu on the left and publish your Copilot. You then get a link to test your Copilot. Here is mine below in a simple demo website.

There we go – a very simple first look at the potential of Microsoft Copilot Studio. Next time we will explore a little more. Have a play and look at the potential and possibilities.

How can I try Copilot Studio?

Copilot Studio is available to try now and will be available to all Microsoft 365 customers who have a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license.

Summary

Copilot Studio should bring the same ease of use to Gen AI apps as Power Platform did for apps, virtual agents and flow. It’s central hub, intuitive design tools, robust testing capabilities, and simple yet powerful deployment options aim to help accelerate and simplify the design, build, testing and deployment of custom AI applications.

By providing users with the tools to develop their own copilots, Microsoft is fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration. Copilot Studio opens up countless possibilities for businesses, researchers, and developers alike. Whether it’s creating intelligent chatbots, generating realistic text, or automating repetitive tasks, the potential applications of GPTs are limitless.

Similar to its counterpart GPT Store, Copilot Studio puts the power of AI into the hands of those who seek to harness its capabilities. It offers a user-friendly interface that streamlines the process of building custom GPT models and applications. This accessibility ensures that individuals with various levels of technical expertise can participate in this exciting field, expanding the boundaries of what is possible with language-based AI.

The demo build example is a simple first step into building Gen AI led chatbots and copilots using websites and other data sources. This is simple to test and try.

Microsoft Mesh to enter public preview in October

Microsoft Mesh Image Example

Yes, I thought Mesh was dead too – but it’s not! Today (Sept 26th), Microsoft announced that Microsoft Mesh will be going into Public Preview in October 2023.

What is Microsoft Mesh?

Microsoft Mesh is a new 3D immersive experience that will be surfaced through Microsoft Teams. It aims to help blur the lines between the physical and virtual space, “re-imagining the way employees come together” through three-dimensional (3D) immersive experience known as “digital spaces”. Backed up by information in Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index Report, “organisations need new ways for people to connect from different locations or geographies, using the tools they already have”.

People will be able to join these immersive spaces in Microsoft Teams, or via custom immersive space in Microsoft Mesh. Either way, this will transform the two-dimensional meeting into a 3D immersive experience.

These immersive spaces will each have unique attributes that create a perception of being physically together in a 3D digital space, including spatial audio interaction, co-presence, and immersion feedback.

Microsoft Mesh Example | Image (c) Microsoft
Microsoft Mesh Example | Image (c) Microsoft


Microsoft Mesh will be customisable

Microsoft say that organisations and teams will be able to customise these immersive spaces in Mesh using a “no-code” editor or by using a dedicated “Mesh toolkit”.

Secure and Inclusive

Microsoft Mesh is built on Microsoft 365 with the usual enterprise-grade security and privacy. It will support haptic feedback on supported devices and supports certified dedicated VR headsets such as Oculus Quest 2, and as well as on PC.

Getting Started with Mesh

Once available, IT will need to ensure users have a suitable base license (Teams Essentials, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Microsoft 365 E3/E5, or Office 365 E1/E3/E5. and will also need to enable / authorise the use of the Mesh app for Teams once available. Teams Premium is also needed.

The new Immersive spaces will be available in the classic Teams app, followed shortly afterwards in the new Teams.

Users can also download the Mesh app for PC from the Microsoft Store or the Mesh app for Meta Quest devices from the App Lab.

Microsoft Teams Premium is needed to use Microsoft Mesh.

Cisco Thousand Eyes: End-to-End visibility into Cloud App performance.

Hybrid Work and the growth of SaaS makes troubleshooting end user experience so much harder.

ThousandEyes by Cisco is a digital end user experience monitoring solution that helps ensure your business SaaS apps are running at optimum performance wherever your employees or customers are.

ThousandEyes proactively monitors, alerts, and provides visual “route cause analysis” within minutes of a User Experience issue, regardless of if whether the issue is the LAN, WAN, Internet, “XaaS”, ISP, Collaboration Service (such as Teams, Webex or Zoom), or Cloud Provider. It can even determine whether the issue is caused by any third-party dependency such as Content Delivery network, Application, Connector, Secure Web Gateway, Identity Provider, or firewall.

What is ThousandEyes?

ThousandEyes enables organisations to rapidly increase the responsiveness of support teams and managed service providers by providing end-to-end visibility and performance monitoring across the ever-changing and distributed IT landscape wherever your applications, data, infrastructure, user, and devices are located by.
This helps organisations to:

  • Better support their hybrid workforce with near-real-time visibility of the employee’s experience.
  • Quickly identify and solve app experience issues by continually monitoring employee interactions with web and SaaS-based applications.
  • Gain end-to-end visibility from the user, across the network, WAN, and the Internet as well as to their cloud service providers and SaaS applications.

Cisco Thousand Eyes provides and end-to-end End user Experience Monitoring to help ensure that your employees / customers experience of your service or applications is “as expected” and helps proactively detect when there are issues which might impact this performance before users start complaining.

End to end visibility with Cisco ThousandEyes

Thousand Eyes provides end to end visibility and intelligence”. Its aim is to help IT provide the best possible employee and customer experience, whatever the application or service by comprehensively measuring and monitoring network performance end-to-end. This means that IT get complete visibility across the internet or WAN, edge, network, application, routing, and device layers to see exactly how and where the Internet and WAN connectivity is impacting employee or customer user experience.

Paying customers of ThousandEyes – and one of its’ killer features, is its’ ability to perform performance “snapshots” which provide clear-cut information – either on demand, or on a schedule. These can be shared with people outside your organisation and is pivotal to proving where the fault lies, therefore helping to help SaaS vendors troubleshoot their own infrastructure and it won’t be a surprise that many of the worlds’ largest SaaS providers are also Cisco Thousand Eye customers!

It does this by using “active monitoring” that utilises a software agent that simulates user activity and checks availability from multiple locations. Cisco leverage Thousand Eyes agents across much of their network equipment including wireless access points and switches (such as the Cisco Catalyst 9k), Cisco SDWAN solutions and SASE services, and is even incorporated into their Webex Meetings platform. There are also agents for desktop devices that can be deployed and what’s more you don’t need a Cisco network to use it. Thousand Eyes is proven to work well with leading SaaS and collaboration platforms such as Slack, Webex and Microsoft Teams.

Cisco Thousand Eyes – Image (c) Cisco.

The Synthetic testing constantly simulates user interaction with SaaS and Web applications, represented by a series of page loads interspersed with interactions like typing in fields and clicking buttons, making the synthetic test “feel” like a user to the actual applications under test. These tests are invaluable to application and network operations staff, since it helps IT and App Support better understand actual user experiences rather than playing the best guess or deflect game. These are presented back as “experience scores” which can be reported on, alert and track trends over time, providing an early warning before issues arise.

What problem does ThousandEyes fix?

In short, when an employee or a customer has a bad digital experience, they don’t care where the problem is, or what has caused it – they simply want to know what is wrong and when it might be resolved.

Marketing slide from Cisco ThousandEyes

The need and therefore market for this kind of tool is increasing, as the global pandemic dramatically accelerated the shift to the cloud and SaaS apps, and with the hybrid work, now just the way we work, we need a better way of monitoring and managing the end-to-end employee experience in an environment that no longer directly in control of IT!

As the world settles into what is now a hybrid work world dominated by the continual adoption of SaaS apps and work from anywhere mindset, visibility into how applications are performing for your employees and customers across the internet and various cloud services is critical to business continuity, employee, and customer experience.

Hybrid Work and the growth of SaaS
makes troubleshooting end user experience so much harder.

Today, we, many organisations are still reliant on “self-diagnosis” (or no diagnosis), which leads to conversations like “it’s the network” or “my broadband is slow” or “XXX application is running slow”. This might have been ok during the peak of the pandemic when everyone was sent home to work and was “making the best out of temporary situation”, but three years on this from this, diagnosing and troubleshooting performance related issues is still too commonplace. Now, more than ever, the ability to monitor the end-to-end performance of your business apps, dictates the experience of your customers and employees and the excuses of before are no longer tolerated.

When an employee or a customer has a bad digital experience, they don’t care where the problem is or what has caused itthey simply want it fixed quickly.

Many of these issues are not new, but the shift to cloud and our new distributed hybrid workforce, means that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to understand and support the right “experience” using traditional legacy application performance management tools. What’s more the lack of visibility can often means employees and customers can be having a poor experience without IT or support evening knowing about it until someone complains!

Who needs ThousandEyes?

  1. Do you have employee experience issues due to lack of Internet, WAN or SaaS visibility?
  2. How do you know your Content Delivery Provider is serving your content quickly and consistently whether users at home or in the office?
  3. Do you have inhouse web apps and need a better way of understanding how they perform? when your users work remotely or from disparate offices?
  4. Does your IT help desk struggle to add value and provide answers to users experience issue with SaaS applications?
  5. Is the lack of visibility and ability to monitor cloud apps, impacting employee productivity and/or customer experience?

If the answer to the above is mainly “yes”, then it’s worth looking at investing your time in a proof of concept to see how Thousand Eyes could help.

Why Cisco?

Personally, I think ThousandEyes is a great fit for any organisation with a cloud-first approach that has offices globally and leverages a high degree of hybrid workers (that’s most of us right!)! Whilst it’s not limited to those with only Cisco networks, the economics work well for organisations that already leverage Cisco networking, due to native integration across most of Cisco’s core product offerings including their Cisco Catalyst networking, SASE, SDWAN and their Collaboration suite (Webex).

This makes integration and deployment slick and negates the need to deploy additional agents, since Cisco include the ThousandEyes agent across many of their devices. Customers that buy into Cisco Enterprise Agreements also get a more competitive price point for ThousandEyes and from a support perspective it’s an integrated suite which means less finger pointing.

Speak to a Cisco partner for help

Speak to your favourite Cisco Gold Partner (I’m happy to help you need one) and they will be able to help demonstrate, deploy, configure, and support ThousandEyes for your organisation.

You will find your trusted Cisco partner can help in many ways including:

  • Demos, PoCs or specific product/application performance assistance
  • Cisco funded free trials
  • Help with business case development following a successful PoV
  • Scoping, deployment and tuning to ensure you can monitor all your in-house web and public SaaS hosted applications, connecting into your underlying Wireless LAN, WAN, MPLS, Internet connectivity and WFH remote locations to provide end-to-end visibility and end user performance monitoring.
  • Consultancy and support to ensure key departments, locations, users, and application estate is under cover.
  • Access to the best pricing through your Cisco Gold Partner.

See it action and find out more

Cisco provide free to access to this awesome “live outages site” where you can look at the live state of the world’s most popular commercial and consumer cloud services and see just how comprehensive and simple it is to use.

https://thousandeyes.com/outages
Cisco ThousandEyes Outages Site

Webex Contact Center now certified for Microsoft Teams

Bread with Teams and Cisco Logo

Webex Contact Center is an Enterprise Class CCaaS solution that enables skill-based routing of inbound “call centre” type calls and is designed to provide a seamless end-to-end customer service experience across voice, chat, email, and social media channels.

The big news this week is that Cisco Webex Contact Centre has just received office Microsoft Teams certification.

This is great for organisations, Microsoft, Cisco, and solution partners.

Great for Organisations

The Webex Contact Center Integration for Microsoft Teams combines rich omni-channel customer engagement capabilities with Microsoft Teams to break down barriers between contact center agents and the enterprise.

Whilst the CCaaS space in Teams is already quite well served by other vendors such as Luware, Anywhere 365, and Enghouse, Cisco Webex Contact Centre is a true Enterprise Class Contact Centre, trusted by many of the world largest enterprise organisations including EasyJet for example.

Some organisations who have been keen to fully embrace the potential of Microsoft Teams have often found themselves compromising on alternative “certified” CCaaS platforms. They can now have the best of both in a fully supported environment.

Great for Microsoft

In short this helps them protect their install base, since Microsoft certainly does not want to see their competition like Zoom, RingCentral, or Google muscle into their accounts base on the strength of their CCaaS offerings. By working with Cisco (as they are also doing in the Meeting Room space) they can now work more strategically together since Cisco and Microsoft already share around 90% of the same customer base.!

  • Adds a truly enterprise class CCaaS platform into the Teams ecosystem
  • Will further strengthen the partnership and collaboration between Microsoft and Cisco, the two leading technology companies that offer complementary solutions increasing the overall value proposition to their shared customer base.
  • Helps Microsoft expands the market reach of Microsoft Teams, which is already boasts more than with 280 million monthly users without (less) fear of losing market share to Cisco.
  • For organisations who require the best CCaaS solutions without compromising or mixing their collaboration and productivity tools, they leverage Cisco Webex Contact Centre without disrupting the flow of work for loyal Teams users with a seamless and integrated CCaaS solution from Cisco.

Great for Cisco

For Cisco this enables them to compete less and instead offer enterprise CCaaS services to their existing customer base who have been migrating or plan to migrate their UC platform to Microsoft Teams. Rather than risk losing out on the Contact Centre solution, Cisco can now meet their customers on their “turf“, providing the Contact Centre and CX solutions their customers need on their collaboration and productivity platform of choice whether that is Webex or Microsoft Teams.

Great for Microsoft and Cisco Partners

OK, so a little plug here for Cisilion (my employer), but for us (and therefore for me personally) I am excited about this because this brings an immense opportunity for Cisilion to leverage our unique position in our Cisco and Microsoft partnerships expertise and capability which will hugely benefit the services and solutions we can deliver to our clients.

  • As a Microsoft Teams specialist partner and Cisco Master Collaboration partner in the we are now empowered to deliver the best in enterprise CCaaS solutions to our customers alongside their choice of wider collaboration and productivity tools whether that is Cisco CUCM, Cisco Webex, or Microsoft Teams.
  • It helps us to attract and retain customers who are looking for a seamless and reliable customer service experience across multiple channels without having to shift partner due to technology choice changes.
  • It enables us to strengthen our deep partnerships and experience with enterprise class calling, meetings, platform and contact centres solutions across the two leading trusted technology providers.
  • Extends our ability to provide end-to-end design, implementation, integration, support and manged services across Cisco and Microsoft Collaboration solutions.
  • Enables us to provide cost and operational efficiencies both internally and to our customers.

Cisco Webex Contact Centre for Teams

The key outcomes that Webex CCaaS provides when integrated with Teams includes:

  • For the first time, brings a Unified calling platform between Cisco Webex Contact Centre and the organisations Microsoft Teams environment.
  • Allows for improved cross-function collaboration, knowledge sharing, and Customer Experience reporting among agents, supervisors, and other Teams users.
  • Advanced intelligent skill-based routing and queuing, which means customers can reach the right agent faster and more efficiently.
  • Providing a full and seamless customer service experience across voice, chat, email, and social media channels.
  • Delivers the core functionalities that high-performing multi-disciplined customer service teams require, such as call recording, voicemail, auto attendant, intelligent AI powered chat services, call back and rich social media integration.
  • Includes next-generation end-to-end Cisco security for Enterprise Class data protection and privacy in combination with that provided across the Microsoft 365 Security suite.
  • Brings exceptional management and supervisory controls and actional insights over “customer call handling”, with features like call analytics, call quality management, sentiment analysis, call control and full customer Lifecycle management.

Find out more

For more information about the announcement please see the following links.

Microsoft Announcement

Cisco Webex Contact Centre

What is Teams Premium?

Microsoft Teams Premium is a paid tier of Teams announced in October 2022 at the time of the Microsoft Ignite conference and is generally available from Feb 2023. (so now).

These additional capabilities (more info later) are focussed around:

  • Creating more personalised and intelligent meetings and webinars.
  • Improved and enhanced security protection for meetings
  • Advanced management and reporting capabilities for IT.
  • Advanced Virtual Appointments.
  • Deep AI analytical date provided through Open AI’s GPT 3.5

It costs around $10 pupm depending on your region, country and license agreement.

What are the differences?

Not to be confused with Teams Room Premium (now Teams Room Pro), Teams Premium is Teams add-on license that allows organisations that already have Teams with their Microsoft 365 subscriptions to further enhance their Teams experience with benefits such as more personalised and intelligent meetings, enhanced meeting protection, and advanced management deep AI and reporting capabilities.

Teams Premiums’ key features over the “standard” version included within Microsoft 365 can are summarised below. The data is taken from official Microsoft information, the source of which is here).

Meetings

Teams Premium provides additional features for customizing meetings including enhanced templates, customisable themes, company backgrounds and custom together modes and analytics provided through GPT 3.5 open AI model

FeatureTeams
(Standard)
Teams Premium
Host and attend Teams Meetings✔️✔️
Experience Teams’ standard look and feel✔️✔️
Use standard & custom meeting backgrounds at user level✔️✔️
Read live captions during meetings✔️✔️
Customise meeting templates for your company✔️
Add company branding to meeting lobbies✔️
Customise meeting backgrounds for your company✔️
Customise Together mode scenes for your company✔️
Read live translated captions during meetings✔️
Translate post-meeting transcriptions (coming soon)✔️
Turn on real-time data storage✔️
Turn on eCDN for Live Events✔️

Webinars and Premium events

Teams Premium provides an advanced webinar experience for organisers, presenters and attendees.

FeatureTeams
(Standard)
Teams Premium
Require attendees to register✔️✔️
Assign a co-organiser✔️✔️
Limit the number of people who can register✔️✔️
Read live captions during meetings✔️✔️
Turn on Q&A for webinars with up to 1000 attendees✔️✔️
View attendance reports✔️✔️
Integrate with Dynamics 365✔️✔️
Set up a green room for webinar presenters✔️
Manage attendees’ view✔️
Send reminder emails to registrants✔️
Create a webinar wait list✔️
Manually approve registrants✔️
Limit the day and time when people can register✔️
Allow registered users to bypass the lobby✔️
Use RTMP-In for Webinars (coming soon)

Meeting Protection / Security

Teams Premium provides additional ways to safeguard meetings with features such as sensitivity labels, meeting water marking and end to end encryption which includes video, chat and content.

FeatureTeams
(Standard)
Teams Premium
Manage meeting lobbies✔️✔️
End-to-end encryption for one-to-one calls✔️✔️
Moderate meeting chats✔️✔️
Control who can present✔️✔️
Add watermarks to meetings✔️
E2E encryption for meetings with up to 50 attendees✔️
Control who can record✔️
Prevent copy/paste in meeting chats✔️
Assign Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels for meetings [Requires Microsoft 365 E5]✔️
Custom user policy packages✔️
Turn on advanced meeting monitoring and alerting✔️

Meetings Reporting

FeatureTeams
(Standard)
Teams Premium
View recordings of meetings✔️✔️
View meeting transcripts✔️✔️
View and use files added to meetings✔️✔️
View and use apps added to meetings✔️✔️
Navigate meeting recordings with autogenerated chapters (coming soon)✔️
View time markers in meeting recordings when you joined or left a meeting (coming soon)✔️
Search meeting transcripts with speaker suggestions (coming soon)✔️
View and act on autogenerated tasks from meetings (coming soon)✔️
View when you were @mentioned✔️

Virtual Appointments

With any Microsoft 365 license,  users can use basic Virtual Appointments capabilities to schedule and join business-to-customer meetings. For example, users can schedule appointments in the Bookings calendar and external attendees can join through a browser without having to download Teams.

Teams Premium provides advanced Virtual Appointment capabilities, such as SMS notifications, custom waiting rooms, and analytics.

FeatureTeams
(Standard)
Teams Premium
Access Virtual Appointments with the Bookings app for scheduling, appointment management, and email notifications✔️✔️
Integrate Virtual Appointments using APIs✔️✔️
Join appointments from a browser✔️✔️
Join appointments in Teams✔️✔️
Allow users to join a virtual lobby waiting room✔️✔️
Integrate with Microsoft Forms✔️✔️
Customize the lobby waiting room with themes and logos✔️
Send SMS notifications✔️
Chat back and forth with attendees in the lobby waiting room✔️
Organizational and departmental analytics✔️
View and manage scheduled appointments in the queue✔️
View and manage on-demand appointments in the queue✔️
Send post-appointment follow-ups (coming soon)✔️

Who needs Teams Premium

Whilst not every organisation (or user within an organisation) may need Teams Premium.

Organisations can try Teams Premium by purchasing the zero-cost Teams Premium 30-day trial license available in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Organisations with a Teams Premium trial license will have up to 25 licenses to assign to users. Those 25 users can experience and test Teams Premium features as they become available. Also, the admin can manage Teams Premium features for the 25 licensed users. The trail will last 30 days after which the premium features ill be disabled unless a paid license is purchased for the users that need / want them.

Most organization segments can purchase and use the Teams Premium trial license, excluding GCC High and DoD tenants.

Beware: “Some” Teams features will also move to Teams Premium

Microsoft have advised that with the general release of Teams Premium (in Feb 2023), some Teams features will in fact move from Teams licenses to Teams Premium licenses.  To be fair these are mainly centered around advanced reporting, company branding and webinar premium features.

Features moving to Teams Premium are:

  • Live translated captions.
  • Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings.
  • Custom organisation settings:  Together mode scenes.
  • Virtual Appointments: SMS notifications.
  • Virtual Appointments: Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center.
  • Virtual Appointments: Scheduled queue view.

Preparing for Teams Premium

To prepare your organisation for Teams Premium and to determine if, where and when it fits, the following are key IMO

  • Take advantage of the free (25 user) 1 month trail to ensure IT and your Client Success Teams can understand the user and admin features
  • Run a trial for key departments around the areas of most interest or value
  • Update or deliver end user training to ensure you get the value from the new features
  • Gather feedback from trial and live users to assess wider deployment
  • Keep your support team in the loop (so they can support your users with these new features)

Microsoft may have a solution to solve the Hybrid Hangover

The cost of real estate for business is the second largest recurring cost item (first is people) and can often be more than 20% of annual costs. Since even before the pandemic, though fueled hugely because of hybrid work practices, organisations are looking for ways to be smarter with this space and better understand, plan, and manage these expensive costs.

As we talk about ways to optimise cost within an organisation, we often think about cost optimisation with regards to cloud spend, consolidating vendors, smarter hiring and moving more power hungry, space consuming data centres to cloud.

Announced at this year’s Microsoft Ignite Conference, Microsoft Places could be the redeeming feature large organisations need to help optimise their office real estate both now and for years to come.

What is Microsoft Places?

Hybrid work promises us the best of all worlds. The ease and comfort of working from home, the connection and energy of engaging with our coworkers in the office, and the flexibility and opportunity of working where we want. But today, there are still challenges preventing this promise from becoming a reality.

Microsoft Places is a new (coming in 2023) connected workplace platform that promises to deliver on the promise of blending the best of hybrid and in-person work. Microsoft places is a new platform (yes, platform not product), that will deliver solutions that help organisations coordinate where work happens, modernise the office with intelligent technology, and optimise the workplace for the continuing ever-changing needs.

Microsoft Places – Video: Microsoft

I said before, Microsoft Places is not a product – it’s a suite of products and services which will slowly embed themselves across the wider Microsoft 365 services like Team and Outlook which is where people spend their time. In short this is all about making the office space are more responsive to everyone’s needs.

Image: (c) Microsoft

Microsoft Places, aims to intelligently leverage signals, data and building systems to provide a truly connected workspace experience, bringing the best employee experience, through a single, unified platform which builds upon the building and technology infrastructure to create an environment which can adapt to serve the unique and changing needs of hybrid work and allows leaders and facilities management to better plan and manage their real estate.

The key services will include:

  • Hybrid scheduling – which will leverage common data signals from Outlook and Teams to allow employees to view their week(s) ahead and see when co-workers and others you need to work or collaborate with are planning to be in the office.
  • Intelligent booking for meetings – will help employees discover available spaces with the right technology to match your meeting purpose and mix of in-person or remote participants. This will also feature recommendations for the shortest commute times, along with prompts that provide guidance on when to leave the office for next meeting and ensuring you don’t get booked back-to-back when you have in person meetings to travel to.
  • Wayfinding – will help employees quickly find the right meeting room, which is key for larger organisations with many locations, buildings, and rooms. Employees will be able to see live interactive maps from their mobile device that guides them to the to the right location.
  • Hot desk booking – will mean that employees can see choose where to sit and reserve desks or rooms accordingly. Updates to Microsoft Teams Rooms will bring more inclusive features for hybrid meetings such as auto-framing, content capture and more.
  • Meet-ups – will allow employees to easily create impromptu meetups and share with others in the office.
Mock-up of Microsoft Places – Image (c) Microsoft

Insights and Data for Leaders

Since all this will leverage the wider Microsoft 365 suite and power of the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Places will provide a plethora of data driven insights such as utilisation data, energy-saving opportunities, and occupancy trends to better manage the physical space.

This data will help leaders and facilities management make any necessary dynamic space adjustments on a particular day or week such as changing excess huddle rooms to overbooked collaboration rooms or converting meeting rooms into more hot desking areas.

Microsoft Places – Image (c) Microsoft

This data will provide not only trends and usage data but will also allow organisations to better prepare, plan and optimise the real estate they have available and how it’s used to maximum potential. This may include reducing available floors on lighter foot fall days – saving energy expenditures and improving the workplace experience for everyone as well as working with managers and team leaders to better understand office trends around people, and spaces and places across their entire portfolio, creating more flexible, dynamic, and sustainable places that support new ways of working.

Working with Connected Spaces Partners

Since the building fabric, sensors and existing management platforms are critical to the success of a modern intelligent building, Microsoft have partnered with many industry and technology partners. This ecosystem of partners will build on top of the Microsoft Places platform with new and existing solutions, leveraging, and enhancing the rich data of the Microsoft Graph.

The list of partners (which will grow closer to release) include.

  • Accenture
  • Appspace
  • CBRE
  • Cisco (coming soon with DNA Spaces)
  • Conseco
  • EY
  • Honeywell
  • Johnson Controls
  • Swift Connect and
  • Many more

Availability

Microsoft say that Places will enter preview in early 2023 with general availability later next year. Microsoft will release more information on this over the next couple of months.

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.

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.

Microsoft Viva Sales: Aims to provide seamless integration from any CRM into Office 365 and Teams.

With the annoucement the Viva Sales platform, Microsoft aims to help organisations harness the power of their existing CRM platform and seamless expose this within and across Microsoft Teams and Office 365 without third party apps, plug-ins, or data exchange tools. Microsoft’s goal is a native, common and familiar experience regardless of an organisations choice of CRM system.

Viva Sales will connect customer data across from any CRM into Teams and Office.
Image: (c) Microsoft

This approach is not unique to Microsoft. Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack last year was in part to enable them to ramp up their communications tools for sales teams. Microsoft, however, is not looking to compete directly with Salesforce or any specific CRM vendor. Microsoft’s goal here is more around “filling gaps” left behind by legacy and traditional CRM systems that done provides the “smarts” that systems like Salesforce and Dynamics 365 provide for example.

In the official announcement of Viva Sales, Microsoft said:

We definitely think people benefit from a CRM system, the difficulty is, a lot of what’s happening between a customer and a salesperson is actually never recorded in the CRM system, because it’s just too tedious.”.

Jared Spataro | Corporate VP for Microsoft 365

What does Viva Sales do?

Due for release in Q4 2022, Viva Sales will allow sales and marketing teams to automatically synchronise data between any, and all, of their communications applications such as Microsoft Teams and Outlook, and their CRM system which does not have to be Dynamics 365 either. This is like the Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Slack integration, and what Microsoft have done natively with Dynamics 365 and Teams.

In their official blog, Microsoft describe Viva Sales as a intelligent service which enables sellers to capture insights from across Microsoft 365 and Teams, eliminate manual data entry, and receive AI-driven recommendations and reminders – while staying in the flow of work. Viva Sales promises to streamline the seller experience by surfacing the insights with the right context within tools people already use, without them needed to dip in and out of their CRM therefore saving time and ensuring that the CRM becomes part fo the core workflow without compromise on the productivity tools the teams use across the wider organisation.

Microsoft say that Viva Sales will work with any CRM to automate data entry and brings AI-powered intelligence to sellers in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

The key benefit for organisations using Viva Sales is that is that Viva is already (naturally) integrated with Microsoft Teams and Outlook which are used and adopted.

The launch of Viva Sales isn’t just about sales however. What!!!?, Well, Microsoft has a much broader vision with Viva to provide a layer of intelligence across its entire Office 365 suite and Teams. This strategy is demonstrated by the incredible reach and integration available through the Microsoft Graph – a major part of strategy for moving beyond the underlying enterprise resource planning tools and more towards the type of workflow play displayed and respected by the likes of ServiceNow.

A Change of Approach

This approach is a strategic shift for Microsoft. In the past, Microsoft’s go-to-market strategy was to require their customers to choose their products such as Teams and Dynamics 365 over the say WebEx, Zoom and then Salesforce or HubSpot. With Viva Sales, this is now about choosing what products work for you and then leveraging the intelligence services through Viva and the Microsoft Graph to bridge them together and provide data intelligence on top.

“The most significant thing about this announcement is we are saying … choose whatever you want to choose — what we actually think will be most valuable over time will be the layer of intelligence that binds it all together.”.

Microsoft

Microsoft have compared the enterprise software industry to that of a city, where it is built from the ground up. For example, If Azure, AWS and GCP are the city’s foundations, then SaaS applications and workflow are its roads and buildings.

“People will keep putting money into sewers and roads and stuff like that,” he said, “but a lot more money goes into the hardware put on top.”

What do you think?

What do you think of the announcement? Is this a good move for Microsoft or are sellers better off just working in their native CRM?




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Viva Goals promises to bring ‘purpose and alignment’ to the employee experience

Microsoft Viva Goals has just been annouced and has entered a closed private preview. It was released late in 2022 and can be bought standalone or as part of the Microsoft Viva suite subscription.

What does this bring?

Viva Goals is based heavily upon Microsoft’s 2021 aquisition Ally.io, who are a world leader in the realm of objectives and key results (OKR) platform which will find its way into Viva and gradually across the rest of Microsoft 365 and Teams. Viva Goals promises to help aligns teams to an organisation’s strategic priorities and will bring them together around an organisations’ company mission and purpose and values.

According to Microsoft’s latest work trend index report, more than half of all managers say they feel leadership is ‘out of touch’ with employee expectations around work life, hybrid work, and workload commitments. This new Viva Goals module is designed to address this by bringing purpose and alignment into Viva alongside the other core purposes the focus on culture and communications, wellbeing and engagement, growth and development, as well as knowledge and expertise.

Viva Goals (image (c) Microsoft

“Viva Goals brings business goals into the flow of everyday work, making it easier to stay up to date with connected data and automated reminders as well as to share OKRs and their progress across the organization with customized dashboards and quick links. It integrates with Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, etc.—and has more integrations to come with Microsoft Viva, Power BI, and other Microsoft 365 apps and services”.

Vetri Vellore |Corporate VP |Microsoft Viva Goals

Vellore states that (according to the work trend index report) 77% of employees say it’s important or very important for their employer to provide a sense of purpose and meaning at work, and 69% say its important or very important to be rewarded for impact instead of hours worked.

Want to see Viva Goals in action

Viva Goals is available now to buy or as a admin led trial. To learn more about the wider Microsoft Viva suite, visit the Microsoft Viva website and check out the video below.

Viva Goals in action (YouTube)