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Business Critical Teams: 5 Steps to What You Should Do About it!

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Joel Oleson

Is Teams business critical in your organization? Are you keeping up with it? If you have resources and energy to keep up with Teams, I applaud you. Teams is the fastest growing product in Microsoft History, and clearly becoming critical to everyday work in nearly all the Fortune 500 and even small and medium business. Not just meetings, calling and chat, but running essential applications and dashboards in Teams with rich collaboration and reporting it is at the heart of the business.

Why is Teams becoming business critical? In this session we’ll dive into the Teams Platform to help you understand what matters most including key infrastructure and application platform. In this session we’ll help you understand the most important aspects of monitoring Teams which relies on key workloads like SharePoint and Exchange and M365 groups and AzureAD. We’ll dive into the M365 Front door and global distribution considerations.

I’m happy to share I’m delivering a webinar on 5 key fundaments for your Microsoft 365 Teams Service Offering. This webinar is sponsored by our friends at ENOW Software. They provide solutions for those looking to ensure availability and uptime monitoring above and beyond what Microsoft provides. If you stick around till the end you’ll see their cool dashboards which are used in many critical environments where proactive response is essential.

In addition to the 5 Steps revealed in the webinar we’ll be diving into these key areas of a business critical Teams:

Learn the key security and compliance components to implement and monitor Teams
Discover the best way manage the user experience to keep your users productive
Learn strategies for roles and responsibilities, along with key metrics and measures, to focus your team across the ever changing workloads of Microsoft 365
Learn to establish ground breaking fundamentals for a center of excellence and take your service to the next level
Discover techniques and practical tips to increase your adoption.

>> Register Now!

Note: If you can’t make it during the live session, go ahead and register and we’ll send you the recording and link to the powerpoint.

Success with Viva Topics

Posted on May 13, 2022 by Joel Oleson

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Viva Topics one of the founding Viva Suite modules focused on User Experience. Search has been one of the challenges users face in any corporate enterprise environment. Struggling to get up to speed, or earnestly trying to be aware of what’s going on around you. Viva Topics helps one keep in tune and be aware of what’s going on around them through a series of topics pages that are intertwined in the work we do everyday. The goal of any organization should be to capture knowledge and make it repeatable and easy to access, securely of course. Knowledge at your fingertips.

The Viva Suite is known as the user experience platform. While Viva is still relatively very new to most organizations, Viva Topics has been beyond reach to most organizations. It’s been a struggle to even imagine what it could be as it’s a challenge when you’re trying to build a pilot environment without documents, collaboration signals, active employees and taxonomies. Prepping for Viva Topics will stretch your technical team in a number of unusual ways. Ultimately the management of the Topics should find it’s home somewhere in the business, but just like getting someone to get the Acronyms of the organization started, it takes someone caring enough to get the Topics center started. The ways to find success in Viva Topics come from a number of unusual practices not seen in other areas of technology.

Seed taxonomies and terms to Topics
1. Departments
2. Customers
3. Project, Teams, Sites,
4. Acronyms
5. Locations
6. Offices, Buildings, Conference Room names
7. Industry Specific Terminology – You really don’t want thousands of random topics in a short period of time, but if you had approved terms that made sense it could really give you a massive jumpstart.
Gathering Ontologies, I like to think of Information Architectures and Connecting the Structure in Centers of Excellence, Communities of Practice, Knowledge Centers, Knowledge Bases
Hand Holding Adoption Change Management: Training on the power of using #Hashtags and @mentions in email, yammer, SharePoint pages and news, Teams chats, etc… integration with ToDo and Viva Insights
Feedback and Office Hours
Expertise Finding Strategy – Focused vertical for Who bot or Search based results
Connectors – where is the company knowledge?
Topic Page Template and considerations
Syntex – Structured and Unstructured content that can help drive answers, taxonomies, and terms.
Sensitivity – Topics does give you an opportunity to ensure that people are using Terms. Topics is security trimmed by default, but also has additional layers for keepings rights restricted or even from displaying the topics cards. Topics won’t just show up… they take approval, editing and review prior to publishing. What I call the curation process of culling the topics into the things that add the most value.
Organizational knowledge, preparation and integration

An effective pilot may be a limited scope of users, a limited set of sites and teams, with a limited set of licensed or trial users. Imagine an engineering group and the very specific terminology, expertise, and processes. Even a sales team, there’s the customers, the deals, the locations, and so on which all could drive to a powerful hierarchy of information surrounding and connecting the knowledge to the expertise. Not you don’t need to license Viva Topics immediately, you can start with this scoped set of up to 25 users in a trial. Tony Redmond put together an article worth reading on getting started with a Viva Topics trial.

I’m excited to share my experience setting up a demo tenant loading up documents adding relevant taxonomies and then building the topics, topic pages, and exploring the #hashtags in the UX that are now working in SharePoint pages and news, Outlook web access, and soon to see Teams and yammer.

If you’ve been waiting to get your hands dirty, I’m hopeful you’ll be excited about what is possible today.

Free Webinar: Success with Viva Topics

>> Register Here

Join us on June 7 at 9am Pacific. In addition to hearing about my stories of working with Viva Topics and sharing steps to find success. You’ll also get some updates from Microsoft’s CJ Tan and Chris McNulty and hear about the latest from WAND to help accelerate your investigations, trials, or deployments with seed taxonomies.

Note: This webinar will be delivered in Microsoft Teams Webinars.

Viva Connections webinars for Executive engagement, Corp Comms and Front Line Workers

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Joel Oleson

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New Webinar Series… “Viva Connections Webinar Series for Executive Engagement, Comms Teams, and Front Line Workers” A lot has been happening in the Viva space and it starts with Viva Connections. In this 3 part webinar series for a variety of different roles you’ll get a variety of different perspectives including relevant demos and insights. Bring Together Communications, Knowledge, Learning, and Resources in the flow of work just in time. Accelerate Learning. Improve Productivity. All in a customized and personalizable way.

Microsoft Viva Connections is a company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in the apps and devices you use

 Connect and Engage. Empower Teams. People at the Center.

Viva Connections for the Front Line Worker

Teams has had incredible growth with 10x adoption over the past year. Teams is the hub for modern teamwork. Employees can communicate and collaborate on content and tasks in a streamlined way. Viva connections helps provide targeted links to information like official and featured news, key tools, along with personalized and trimmed content based on role, location, division etc…

Viva is designed around the employee experience, key things that pull a team together including schedules, tasks, team conversations for both individual and team productivity in adaptive interfaces from mobile, tablet, browser, and rich teams client. In this session focused on the front line worker we will look at the latest and greatest in Viva focused on the experience of and art of the possible for the front line worker.

Audience: Business Decision Maker, IT Decision maker, IT Services, IT Manager, Business Manager

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Viva Connections for Executive Engagement

Executive Leadership communication and engagement with employees is critical to the business. Viva Connections provides increased visibility and focus on employee experience. Some of the greatest features in the latest release of Viva Connections is the global news with featured news, webparts and feeds perfect for video or streaming content including AMAs, fire side chats from executives. Bring Communication, Knowledge, Learning, and Insights into an Integrated Experience. Viva Connections is the launchpad for Microsoft Viva and the gateway to your employee experience. Effective communication is essential to a healthy business, but with so many channels, information overload is a real thing.

Audience: CXO and Decision Makers, IT Managers, Business Decision Makers, Yammer & Teams Admins

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Viva Connections for Corporate Communications

Corporate communications this is for you! In this session we’ll dive into Viva Connections for the communications teams. Viva Connections is your gateway to a modern employee experience – are you ready to inform, engage and empower your organization? Join us as we show you how Viva Connections provides a curated, personalized and company-branded experience that centralizes relevant news and conversations. We’ll dig into the targeting and personalization features including the global nav and Deploy easily as it’s fully integrated in the apps and devices your teams already use every day, like Microsoft Teams. Platform Extensibility for Customization and Integration. Discover how you can shape culture and foster communication to help your business and employees thrive.

Audience: SharePoint & Teams admins, Corporate communications, business leaders, Intranet teams, and HR Comms teams

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Darkweb, ransomware, and Human mistakes: recovery for Microsoft 365

Posted on October 12, 2021 by Joel Oleson

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The push for Digital transformation has accelerated due to the pandemic, but so have ransomware attacks and other threats to business data. With cyber attacks getting more sophisticated, is your data protection plan robust enough for the attacks?

More than 25 million! employee passwords at Fortune 1000 companies are available readily in dark web markets & data dumps.

Preparing for this webinar I came across tools on the darkweb for hacking Microsoft 365 and Office 365 among other SaaS services. It’s very sad to see how easy it is to do a targeted attack. I expect you’ll be surprised as well with how simple the hackers have made it to get into any SaaS system… and if you think your on premise environment is any harder, don’t fool yourself… those passwords aren’t just for the cloud. The sophistication of the tools, and the ability for hackers to get at your environment puts extra pressure on ensuring you have proper backup tools as simply providing antivirus and layers of security tools aren’t enough.

By 2022…70% of organizations will have suffered a business disruption due to unrecoverable data loss in a SaaS application. Source: Gartner 2019 “Assuming SaaS Applications Don’t Require Backups is Dangerous.”

In this webinar, you will learn:

Recent real-world cyber attacks examples and understand how it could happen to you
How to setup centralized backup for business data scattered across different locations
How to build a robust disaster recovery plan for ransomware preparedness
Understand Zero Trust and how critical and relevant it is today

When it comes to cyber attacks, it’s not “if” but “when” will it happen! Join the webinar with Microsoft MVP Joel Oleson and Synology to learn how to build a robust data protection plan.

Join me Tuesday November 9 for “Darkweb, Ransomware, and Inevitable human mistakes: Disasters and recovery for your Microsoft environment” hosted by Synology.

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The CEO’s Microsoft Teams calls keep dropping… What do you do?

Posted on September 21, 2021 by Joel Oleson

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Troubleshooting Teams can be intimidating when it seems like you aren’t getting clear answers for executives, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m delivering a webinar with Panagenda to quickly get to the bottom of these call dropping and call quality issues… who wants to sound like a robot?

Join me and the experts at Panagenda on an educational webinar on troubleshooting call quality for executives, VIPs, and those special people in your life…

With Microsoft Teams replacing your organization’s phone system, it is imperative that Teams call quality be consistent and reliable, especially for executives. But when problems arise you need to react quickly, spotlight the problem, and get it fixed. However, without the detailed telemetry data to perform root cause analysis, reported issues continue unchecked by most IT groups. This is painfully true for remote workers where IT has visibility gaps for home networks, internet service providers (ISPs), and endpoint computer performance.

Having the viewpoint from the end-user digital experience is of utmost importance when trying to find the root cause for Teams call quality performance issues. And it’s NOT about just identifying the area related to the problem (i.e., High CPU or Memory Usage, Slow ISP Speeds), it’s about understanding what was causing the problem during the call. What processes and applications were running on the endpoint computer and how was the performance from the home office network and ISP (i.e., Dropped Packets, Hop Count, Round-Trip Times, Peering Distance).

In this webinar, you will receive an introduction to OfficeExpert Endpoint Performance Monitoring (EPM). This new module provides data analytics for Microsoft Teams performance and availability from the end-user perspective. If you want to know the truth about your Teams call quality experience, then please join us to see how actionable insights can speed troubleshooting and help remediate issues before they become frustrations for one of your executives.

The webinar will explore topics including:

· Fast troubleshooting for call quality issue resolution

· Proactive monitoring remote user digital experience

· Identify slow ISP’s causing poor call quality for remote users

· Detailed analytics for end-point computers (CPU, memory usage, background processes, etc.)

· And more… 

Don’t miss the opportunity to take advantage of this timely information.

>> Register and attend for a chance to win a free Xbox One!