Teams Governance: 6 Keys to What Really Matters

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Joel Oleson

What really matters in a Microsoft Teams Deployment? Can you just turn it on and see what happens? What if you were to figure it out along the way? What is Teams Sprawl and why do they refer to your Teams environment as the Wild West? I like to call it herding cats. There’s no reason to herd cats if you can keep your arms around your environment. In fact you can accomplish both good governance and user satisfaction at the same time.

Focused Teams Adoption and Champions Plan – End user confusion is not the thing to start with, but most Teams deployments will likely not be greenfield. There will be some previous environment even if you’re replacing Slack, Skype for Business, or moving data from SharePoint to be used in Teams. Start with a clear migration path, and a very strong community of champions in a pilot environment, DO NOT add confusion by staying in a persistent “islands mode” deployment where users are sent back and forth from Skype and Teams. Adoption is one of the most important keys to a successful environment with Teams. Users need a clear path on what to use when on both Collaboration, File sharing, Voice, and Apps.
Streamlined Provisioning & Lifecycle – Teams provisioning can be simple or a nightmare. You want a good balance of easy to obtain with light approval or to borrow from Nintex a “lazy” approval process where Teams can be auto or quickly approved. You absolutely need to avoid duplication and sprawl. On the back end when someone is done with a Team how does it get archived? What if it is needed later? You need to have a good Teams lifecycle strategy.
Classification & Unified Labeling Strategy with Hubs and Information Architecture – A trusted, structured and easy to use environment starts with good labels such as all external access teams being put into a Hub marked for external. Likewise internal HR Teams should be “Hubified” together into HR to allow search, design, and consistency. From both a management and compliance perspective keeping “like” things together will allow for improved auditing and compliance. It helps both IT and the Users in maintaining a clean, well managed and easy to use environment. Labeling for compliance will be much much easier when setup properly with AIP, DLP, policies, templates, retention and sensitivity labels. Information policies and further security policies can be enforced through good A good structure will support a “Unified Labeling” across Microsoft 365 driven by good governance and Information architecture in Teams.
Manage Sharing for External Files & Guest Access – A well managed environment makes it easy to track external file sharing in the right places. As well managing external guests either through white labeled domains or a process for managing and expiring both links and users. Ensure you have good processes and procedures for either automation or operations and reporting.
Quality Assurance for User Performance with Analytics and User Insights – You need to look beyond out of the box reports for ensuring Network and Call Quality. Early in the deployment you will see optimization that can be done. Don’t be quick to blame Microsoft as 90% of outages are often from Telco’s and network infrastructure that can be optimized. Even user device configuration can be optimized to ensure good performance. In the beginning this means focusing on the bottom 10% and then the bottom 1%, but do NOT ignore the user experience.
Teams as a Platform Application Management including full Power Platform Environments for Dev/Test/Staging (preproduction) and Production – While many would look at the policies in Teams and say it’s about either enabling or disabling apps for governance. I say Teams as a Platform is the goal. It is your job. If you’ve done governance and deployment well, you will find that a solid Teams deployment is one that embraces the Teams as a Platform mantra and looks to see how it can be matured to support “Environments.” Mature Teams environments that support business unit application development in pre production is a healthy way to support the growth of Teams inside your organization. Once your Teams becomes the hub of the company you’ll see how this is way more than deployment, but an investment in your company and where work gets done.

Come join me for 60 minutes on Teams Governance with Q&A. I’ll be diving into each of these 6 Keys to Successful Governance.

When: Wed, Apr 14, 2021 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT / 1PM EDT

Don’t miss the chance to attend the Microsoft Teams governance workshop by Joel Oleson, MVP
Attend this webinar to understand the key elements for streamlining governance using Teams and other Microsoft 365 workloads without compromising on end-user autonomy and IT control.

Please join me, Joel Oleson, MVP, Regional Director, and former Microsoft IT Architect in this free 1 hour webinar on Teams Governance hosted by TeamsHub by Cyclotron for insights and solutions to increase collaboration, productivity, innovation, and adoption for your Microsoft 365 investments.

>> Register now! <<

Teams Voice and Telephony Demystified: 7 Key Questions

Posted on April 1, 2021 by Joel Oleson

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Many have found the power of collaboration in Teams and others are just getting started, but Telephony is still a struggle for many. The transition from Skype for Business or other telephony systems to Teams, can be a challenge to get your arms around an ever changing and improving set of Telephony features. Teams Voice licensing can also be a struggle if you don’t know where to get started. There are a lot of great features, but where does one start?

Are you struggling with getting your arms around Microsoft Teams, phone integration and calling plans?
Still feeling like you’re playing catch-up with Skype for Business and Teams features?
Struggling to get your arms around call quality and direct dialing?
Overwhelmed by calling plans, call quality, and figuring out how to approach it?

In this upcoming free webinar I will be diving into 7 key questions to help you get started with Microsoft Teams Voice and Telephony.

Key Questions to get started with Microsoft Teams Voice and Telephony
Like this infographic? It is shared creative commons share alike. You can download and share.

Seven Key Questions to Unleash the Power of Microsoft Telephony  

Have you assigned numbers and provided Microsoft Teams-certified devices for everyone or VIPs? Number assignment is the way to get users started with Teams voice features. With a Teams device it can be even easier with a single click to connect and with a familiar phone experience. You may find that you want to only support assigned numbers for executives and VIPs and use soft phone VOIP for other users.
Have you enabled audio conferencing and/or cloud compliance recording to add flexibility to meetings with dial-in numbers?
Ever tried joining a conference call, but the wifi signal was poor and wish you could just dial in? Not an uncommon request. It’s helpful to have numbers assigned for those who run regular reoccurring meetings.
Have you implemented Microsoft cloud virtual PBX or will you be using direct routing?
You can leverage your existing telecom SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunks or integrate a virtual PBX for the switch.

Have you decided on a Microsoft calling plan or are you planning on using your existing phone system?
Your long distance carrier at work can be integrated or you can switch to the Microsoft Calling Plans available in numerous locations (18 different countries as of today).
Have you implemented call queues, auto attendant, and contact center integration for your help desk?
From automated attendant, custom greetings to hold music with call queues and integration with existing contact center products, there are a broad range of features for your call center or help desk.
Have you implemented dynamic emergency calling?
Once you configure your e911 system in Teams, emergency calls can be route emergency personnel to the location of your offices based on dynamic emergency calling leveraging the LIS protocol which includes information for subnets of the clients.
Have you educated the organization on cloud voicemail?
Adoption of the Teams Voice features for calling and voicemail can delight users with powerful features, like transcription of speech to text for voicemails and more.

You’re NOT alone.  This session is to help you understand the answers to 7 key questions and get you well on your way. 

 In this one-hour free webinar, Microsoft MVP Joel Oleson and Cayosoft founder Bob Bobel will drill down on the Microsoft Teams telephony stack. We will unlock the knowledge surrounding the key features of calling and telephony in Microsoft Teams and answer 7 key questions to Unleash the Power of Microsoft Teams.

Join us for the free webinar on Thursday April 15 at 11am Pacific Time 2pm Eastern Time to learn more!

>> Register Now <<

Do you Have Regular Backups for Your Microsoft 365 Content & Data

Posted on March 31, 2021 by Joel Oleson

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The Microsoft 365 Services Agreement lists 3 different times a recommended a “regular backup” of your data. According to IDC there are 67% of Microsoft 365 customers who do not regularly backup their data.

It wasn’t until I recently started digging into backups and what Microsoft expects customers to be doing in the 2 way services agreement that I realized many may be relying 100% on Microsoft for recovery of their critical business data without realizing that Microsoft actually expects customers to be managing permissions, managing security, and managing a regular backup.

Microsoft Service Agreement:
•4 a iv – “You should have a regular backup plan as Microsoft won’t be able to retrieve Your Content or Data once your account is closed.”
•4 f – “You should have a regular backup plan.”
•6 b – “We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data…”

Microsoft produced a “Shared Responsibility Model” to help customers to understand who has responsibility and at what level across SAAS, PAAS, IAAS, and On Prem. I highly recommend referring to this across the various workloads and services you may be subscribed to from Microsoft.

Now that you’re wondering about backups. I’m putting together a webinar on backup and recovery for Microsoft 365. In an upcoming webinar I’m going to dive into some of the limitations for how long and in various ways Microsoft 365 retains and backs up your data in Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange. How long can you request a file be restored that was accidentally deleted? What about an incriminating deleted Teams chat messages or a sensitive deleted exchange message or inbox? These questions will be answered and more…

>> Join me as I explore more on this topic in a free 1 hour webinar:

Title: Backup and Recovery for Microsoft 365–SharePoint, Exchange, Teams, OneDrive and More

Get peace of mind and keep your cloud data safe from disaster

When: Session starts on April 20, 2021 at 11 a.m. PDT/2 p.m. EDT.

Do you know how often your data is being backed up? Do you know how many days back you can get your data from Microsoft? Do you know if there was an extended outage what you would do for critical business data? Do you have a business continuity plan in the case of a major breach? These questions and more will be discussed as we reverse engineer the backup and recovery policies of Microsoft and find the edge of the cliff. After you understand the capabilities of Microsoft and the boundary of the cliff, you will explore where are you on the Maturity Model and plans around backup and recovery. The time is better now than ever before to focus on backups for remote employees and backups for Microsoft 365 with a serious plan for business continuity and recovery. Join us in this free, one-hour learning session with Microsoft MVP Joel Oleson and Synology to find out more.

>> Register Now <<

5 Favorite Announcements from Ignite & Best of Ignite Experts MVP Panel

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Joel Oleson

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Power Fx A new language for low code developers to be implemented across the Power Platform. Currently used as the language to develop canvas apps in Microsoft Power Apps, Power Fx will eventually become the consistent language across the Power Platform. You can learn more about this and other Power Platform and Dynamics features announced at Ignite.
The key sessions to watch:
What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Power Platform
Hosted by Charles Lamanna, CVP, Low Code Application Platform and Julie Strauss, Partner PM Director
Power BI and Data
Drive a data culture with Power BI: Vision, strategy, and roadmap
Hosted by Arun Ulagaratchagan, CVP, Power BI

5. Azure – I feel so far behind in the LOADS of updates to Azure. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of Ignite was focused on this. I can’t not mention a few of them.

Semantic search capability in Azure Cognitive Search now in preview.
Azure Communication Services to be generally available, with Microsoft Teams interoperability in preview
Private Azure Marketplace now generally available
Windows Server 2022 is now available in preview
Azure Percept, AI-powered family of edge devices and services, now in preview

Yes I missed about 1000 other things including a few of your favorites I’m sure. Put them in the comments I’d love to hear them so I don’t miss them in the panel, but dive into the Book of Ignite AKA Book of Knowledge AKA Ignite Bible for more.

Join us on Tuesday March 9th at 9am Pacific 12pm Eastern with

Wow! Just wow! IGNITE 2021 has been packed with so many announcements, and roadmap updates…

From Mixed Reality Pokemon adventures with Microsoft to Viva Connections being included with your Microsoft 365 licensing… Did you catch ’em all??? No one did… believe us! As a result the best way to consume all of those updates in the shortest way possible is with a broad experts panel. Here we’ve assembled Developers, Architects, Evangelists, and IT Pros across the Microsoft 365 workloads. Bring your questions and join us for this experts panel! This 1 hour session is an opportunity to hear from top experts, MVPs, RDs to discuss and interact with the community. Bring your questions and be ready to take ferocious notes!

Experts Lineup:
Eric Overfield, CEO of Pixelmill, MVP & MS Regional Director
Jeff Willinger, Digital Workspace Innovator, MVP
Ryan Schouten, MVP Blizzard Entertainment
Joel Oleson, Sr. Product Manager, TeamsHUB by Cyclotron & Founder Joel365, MVP & RD
Sharon Weaver, CEO Smarter Consulting, Microsoft Regional Director
Amber Bahl, CEO, TeamsHUB by Cyclotron

What you’ll learn:: Announcements Roadmap updates Open Q&A Expert Feedback Discussions about what’s coming next

>>Register Here<<

Intelligent Content Enrichment with SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics

Posted on March 1, 2021 by Joel Oleson

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From Content to Knowledge using the Microsoft SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva Topics

>> Register for the upcoming webinar.

Every company struggles with how to move from what many call the “Wild West” of content services. How can content and files be tamed? You’ll need to build an approach for how to Tame this content, but even better would be to unlock the organizational knowledge… classify it, label it, automate and and integrate approvals, and highlight topics with definitions creating organizational knowledge. Microsoft’s latest advancements and release of SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics both provide key features in helping you go from content to knowledge.

For any customer that’s starting from scratch, you’ll notice most content is NOT ready to be analyzed by SharePoint Syntex. I recommend a how a systematic approach to help you get your arms around your data first before moving it into content libraries in SharePoint or into a Content Center. For example discovery can help you first get a handle on repositories size and scale, but some rigorous “File Analysis” to remove Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (Referred to as ROT) information in conjunction with a solid information architecture practice ensures a consistent and reliable content services program. Studies show that 30-40% of all content stored by businesses is considered ROT – understanding and managing this content before it moves to the Cloud is critical to an organization’s search and content services strategies.

Discover

Where does your content live? Most likely it is spread out in Box, Dropbox, Google Drives, FileNet, File Shares, Blob storage, SharePoint and Teams. Many of us would like to skip this step, but the liability of what is being hoarded for years and years simply continues to grow. What is it? How much of it is ROT? What kind of richness or liability does it carry with it?

Information Architecture

Before we get to far, there’s the question of where data should be stored. As you find what I like to call the organizational knowledge aka crown jewels there will be the question beyond the storage mechanism which is the structure. The information architecture to describe and house the knowledge so it can be more easily retrieved. Some companies may design knowledge bases, others content centers, and yet still repositories structured by Team, organization, or simply described by taxonomies and tagging. The task here is to ensure you have a good structure that is often based on the technology it is built on. For Teams they are Teams and channels, for SharePoint they are sites, libraries and lists.

File Analysis

You’ll find the further you dig into the new technology from Microsoft not all files are created equally. Microsoft Office content has many attributes and is structured in a way that’s easy for search to pull content out of it, but what do you do with images, tiff, faxes, and scanned content. There’s also PDFs and bulk and dumps. Any file share migration should involve some level of effort involved in understanding what is stored. Hence the “File Analysis” to remove Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (Referred to as ROT) information. In my experience with file share migrations… it’s not uncommon to find that 70-80% or more can be archived allowing you to focus on the key parts of the content.

Content Enrichment

The newest products from Microsoft really give us a lot to work with here with SharePoint Syntex with document understanding and electronic forms processing both providing classification extraction and AI models that can be used to apply to libraries enhancing our content with intelligent file storage capabilities. SharePoint Syntex provides enriched content types and columns populated by content from within the documents themselves. This allows a much improved user experience of grouping, filtering, sorting and loads of automation capabilities that come along with enriched content. Not only content extraction, but also information governance enhancements such as protecting, labeling, and applying content and applying policies for enforcement or disposition.

Intelligent Migration

Once you’ve classified your content you can move it to be better utilized in knowledge bases, content centers, or other departmental repositories based on content type. One quick example of migrating content is to gather letters, SOWs, Resumes, Invoices, and other contracts in their respective enhanced repositories which provide improved search and discovery. Some may find they have a lot of content that as well meets the criteria of archival or disposition to expire the content.

Automatically identify and Highlight topics

The newest product Viva Topics can be used to have AI to reason over your organization’s data and automatically identify, process, and organize content. It can recognize common topics across content and conversations, organize information, and generate topic pages. Discover and display complementary topics and expertise from across sources across the tools they use every day. Those topic pages can be the start to organizational like wikipedia of knowledge to help both new employees ramp up, but really connect the experts with the knowledge they are producing and provide centers of knowledge for all employees.

I’ve put together this illustration to help one understand the process and methodology for going from content to knowledge.

This infographic: intelligent content enrichment using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics is provided as creative commons share alike. Special thanks to Helux who contributed a lot to the process work on the graphic. You can see more about their intelligent content enrichment process and tools on their site at http://helux.ai

Chaos to Knowledge with SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva on March 10th from 2-3PM EST

Every company struggles with how to move from what many call the “Wild West” of content services. How can content and files be tamed? Join us as we show you how a systematic approach to discovery with File Analysis to remove redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) information in conjunction with a solid information architecture practice ensures a consistent and reliable content services program. Studies show that 30-40% of all content stored by businesses is considered ROT – understanding and managing this content before it moves to the Cloud is critical to an organization’s search and content services strategies.

Microsoft is leading the market in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enrich content with SharePoint Syntex and surface topics in the newly released Microsoft Viva. These new products provide a game-changing way for organizations to classify, extract and build document understanding into their content. For instance, SharePoint Syntex integration with AI Builder and Power Automate allows you to create and use AI Builder form processing models directly from your SharePoint document library, and to automate the processing of forms. The new Microsoft Viva product builds on the power of Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning, and Knowledge — in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best. What you can expect to learn:

• Best practices to achieve the Content Services goal of chaos to knowledge

• How to build Knowledge bases known as Content Centers with SharePoint Syntex

• How to empower knowledge workers with Microsoft Viva

• Understand the latest in Microsoft’s Knowledge Roadmap

Register below for the upcoming webinar where we will walk through these steps and help you understand how SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics fit in a comprehensive process methodology helping you formalize a more cohesive Enterprise Content Services Knowledge Strategy.

Join me in a this free 1 hour webinar on “Intelligent Content Enrichment Using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics: Chaos to Knowledge with SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva” on March 10th from 2-3PM EST sponsored by Helux.