Microsoft Teams is the modern hub for Teamwork.  It’s the place to chat with your team, connect to meetings, and gather notes; it helps manage and provide a single interface for your tasks and projects and work teams.  The best part is the extensibility and focus of bringing enterprise line of business systems together as well.  Working with Chris Barber, we put together a Maturity Model to help customers improve adoption and evaluate platform adoption stages for Teams as an application platform.

Our efforts at defining this model were based on the Microsoft interpreted Carnegie Mellon Maturity Model designed back in 1986 and updated in 2006, then updated by a few community folks for SharePoint in 2010.  Microsoft community appears to have started working on an SPMM model a while back, and I get the impression that Power Platform may be working on something.  So this may be the start of something more to come.  I recommend referring to that model for a great baseline reference in moving between the initial deployment with Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) Apps and connectors to custom apps to later maturity stages of Azure DevOps.

Microsoft Teams as a Development Platform Capabilities Maturity Model

Teams as a Platform – Power Platform Capabilities Maturity Model

1. In the INITIAL stage, you should be comfortable with the platform, learn how to use the in-box bots, apps, connectors, storage, and help users adopt the platform for calling, chats, meetings, conference rooms, and events.
2. In the REPEATABLE stage, you should leverage the Microsoft App templates and the Teams Templates and start building your own templates for repeatability.  Consistency and standardization around a full application lifecycle for both onboarding and offboarding teams.  Leveraging policies and labels for compliance and discovery are highly encouraged.
3. In the DEFINED stage, you should be enabling makers—encouraging the business’s training to take advantage of Power Platform capabilities in the platform.  You should be using Environments for preproduction environments for the lines of business building business applications and solutions.  You should consider using the Power Platform COE Starter kit or equivalent to support and encourage best practices as the business further adopts the business in their efforts to make the platform.
4. The MANAGED stage brings maturity in the multi-staged environment.  Moving apps between dev, test, and production environments.  This is a great opportunity to start supporting full business.
5. The OPTIMIZING stage is focused on an agile development model with Azure DevOps at the core.  A full ALM DevOps pipeline with automation built into the processes, including quality assurance testing and validation for consistency and standardization.

Love to hear your thoughts…

Joel Oleson

@joeloleson

I think a lot of folks have been wondering about the future of SharePoint.  Is it going away?  No.  That’s clear to me.  I participated in a couple of different research groups focused on understanding News and “Modern” Intranet Portals.  It seemed that Jeff Teper doubled down on SPFx and Fluid for Teams and SharePoint.  The new offline capabilities for not only native Microsoft Lists, but custom datasources was super exciting and will encourage people to move their data to SharePoint.  Looking forward to the near term multiple releases that improve the backend of our data in Microsoft 365 improving performance, structure, accessibility, compliance, reliability and robustness.  No one should feel bad that their data is in SharePoint Online.

Here are a few takeaways:

• Go modern in your portals try to keep it out of the box for go forward easiest maintenance
• Use Power Platform for applications for business automation and business integration where SharePoint can be used in variety of different ways, not just storage
• Use SharePoint Framework (SPFx) if you must customize the UX, but ensure the app is built for both Teams and SP
• Offline and low bandwidth capabilities coming to the platform for a richer experience in the browser
• Investments in the Advanced AI with SharePoint Syntex will bring incredible insights, summarization, and allow you to get your head into any data that comes into the platform
• Search improvements will continue to make information more easily accessible and provide insights
• Recent improvements in metadata combined with SharePoint Syntex will add security, compliance, and structure to an unstructured environment and accelerate business process automation and improvements with a variety of structured and semi structured data
• New intelligent storage platform improvements coming
• Patient data compliance support with Microsoft Lists
• Rich UX experiences with Microsoft Lists
• A convergence of Teams and SharePoint UX experiences will continue to improve
• Teams is the preferred UX for accessing SharePoint over time (IMO)
• Improved Site templates, branding experiences, news targeting and portal experiences will continue to improve
• Avoid Classic sites and features get to modern
• Investments have been shipped for modern file experiences including mixed reality and 3D visualization investments with SharePoint spaces
• Updated SharePoint admin center home page with actionable insights
• Recent improvements in visibility on where sites are created from and by whom
• Microsoft 365 has more capabilities for migration for Box
• OneDrive and SharePoint admin center are being consolidated

No SharePoint is not going away, in fact both online and on premises were referenced in Jeff Teper’s session.  Lots of research projects in the SharePoint engineering product team on both enterprise and departmental portals and the lists and file storage side help us understand where the investments are going.  Healthcare and Education bring virtual applications and scenarios.  Just because Teams and Power Platform are getting a lot of attention shouldn’t make you think your data should be elsewhere.  It’s in the right place and major investments continue.

Missed the announcements?  Mark Kashman collected up many of the SharePoint Admin related ones in a single blog post “SharePoint Admin and Migration Ignite announcements” I wrote up a few of the “Top 10 Announcements from Ignite 2020” and the Ignite Book of News from Ignite has even more.  Refer to the Microsoft 365

While Microsoft had some out of this world updates including the Underwater Datacenter project data released.  The project was a success with only 1/8^th the issues of the equivalent land based datacenter.  Many reasons why this project will continue from a sustainability and reliability perspective.   The outerspace update took the events to even further heights.  Azure Orbital allows you to control your satellite and analyze the data coming from the satellite.  Azure analytics and data storage was rebuilt from the ground up cloud first to support real-time analysis of Petabytes of data.  NASA and Lockheed are using Azure Mixed Reality build the latest space craft with near flawless precision.

1. Microsoft Teams had so many announcements! New calling features (including walkie talkie mode), way more interactivity in meetings, new meeting room experiences including, updates to power platform in teams, virtual healthcare electronic health record
2. Project Cortex is now SharePoint Syntex. Advanced AI for content management.  It will be available for purchase from corporations on October 1.
3. Power Automate Desktop delivers RPA (Robotic Process Automation) for users.
4. Power BI Update for the Teams App. A significant enhancement for access to data insights.
5. Hololens 2 ships. Azure Mixed Reality services includes object anchors, new Azure Kinect SDK for partners including Time of Flight depth technology.
6. Power Platform low code and professional developer integration with Github and Azure. New D365 Supply chain management tool with real-time inventory, voice channel and project operations.
7. Updates to Microsoft Lists including enhancements to SharePoint storage and native fluid framework. Stream video sharing integrated with new intelligent storage in SharePoint. SharePoint Lists goes offline seamlessly!
8. New Crowdsource feature for Yammer including voting and enhanced sharing.
9. Security and Compliance Announcements Azure sentinel user and entity behavior analytics and threat intelligence enhancements that support a multi cloud posture for management with Azure Security Center Inventory, Azure Defender, and updates to Azure Arc.
10. The devices updates: Surface Duo which is out now and showcased by many speakers… Then the Surface Hub 2S that’s available in 85 inch model (think MASSIVE TV that’s crazy powerfully interactive) was showcased throughout the show with multiple appearances not just in the Teams sessions. One screen with your call the other screen with your whiteboard.  Major enhancements to the whiteboarding and inking experience.

Next week is Microsoft Ignite. If you don’t plan for Ignite, you’ll be tempted to work through it and say you’ll catch up on videos later… not the best idea. This is going to be different from previous years. \ In a lot of ways Microsoft is designing it such that it is focused on the most meaningful content in smaller chunks.  You’ll notice much of the keynote is broken into 20 to 30 minute sections. The various corenotes, as they have been recently called, are also broken into bite-sized chunks based on attention span.

Ignite is packaged into a 48-hour, round-the-world format with nearly all sessions repeated for a total of 3 deliveries. Essentially, you get the benefit of at least one of the 3 sessions delivered in your daylight hours, with two other possibilities. This post is designed to help you get the most of Microsoft Ignite. It’s time to register and get started. You aren’t going to want to wait as some sessions are limited.

https://myignite.microsoft.com/

7 Steps for Preparing to Get the Most From the Virtual Microsoft Ignite

1. Use the Session Scheduler – Build your session schedule. You’ll notice right from the beginning that Microsoft has taken a start at building out your schedule, but you need to keep going. Lots of things happening at the same time and it will take you some time to sort out what works. This is where you should spend your time. I recommend investing an hour and building out the sessions you want. There are lots of intro sessions that may be valuable for business folks who have never attended an Ignite.
2. RSVP to sessions you want to watch live. Believe it or not, for some sessions…  Space is limited.
3. Use the new “Backpack” to save sessions, speakers, partners, and attendee profiles you find interesting.  It’s essentially like a favorite function. All sessions you’ve added as well as one’s you’ve added to the backpack will be available.
4. Connect with the community in the Community Connect -There are table top topics for community discussion. You can set up meetings with Microsoft engineers, connect with local MS leadership, and then there’s some sessions of Yoga, brain games, and even some art + tech (very limited).
5. Partner/expo hall – There are 17 partners with links, offers, ebooks, and videos. It won’t take you long to look through each of them. Looks like AvePoint is broadcasting a circus or something on Thursday at 4pm.
6. Set up meetings – Microsoft has a meeting tool where you can invite others for meetings. Max 9 people up to 4 hours but as few as 2 people for 30 min.  It will automatically set up a Teams meeting and the tool has an attendee picker. Realistically, will people use it?  You can.
7. Cloud Skills Challenge – Compete for a chance to win free certification test vouchers

After Ignite I hope to meet you at the Ignite Community Meetup.

With 75 million actively daily users now leveraging Microsoft Teams for remote work, virtual learning and so much more, it’s time to ask if you’re getting the most out of Teams functionality.

Here are five ways you can leverage existing Teams technology to improve your Teams Meetings experience:

1. Meeting Agenda

The best meetings are the ones where you know why you’re meeting, so you can quickly get focused and knock out whatever it is that you’re supposed to be talking about. It’s totally ok to use the first few minutes to catch up and ensure the key people in the meeting are in attendance. You’re even more likely to have a successful meeting if people are aware and can follow along with an agenda. The agenda can be sent as part of the meeting invite, which is preferable. It can also be shared on-screen with OneNote or the Team wiki the team the team has access to and which enables you to capture the team’s united agenda, or can be used for a meeting with a broader group agenda. Using a task list for action items is a must. The key to this is make sure everyone has a copy of what was discussed as the meeting is adjourned. For reoccurring meetingsm the agenda and discussion topics are even more important for consistency in a Team whether in a tab or a OneNote.

2. Microsoft Whiteboard

In this age of virtual meetings, the physical whiteboards are out of reach. Luckily, Teams includes whiteboard functionality. You can include a link to the whiteboard for the meeting, which also supports the ability for sticky notes, action items, and checklists. It also includes some very clever tables, charts, and task lists. The whiteboard templates are a great way to get consistency to your brainstorming, mind-mapping or decision-tree sessions.

3. Recording

With enhancements to meetings for things like search, speaker recognition, and speech-to-text, there are a dozen reasons why recording a meeting is a great habit. The archive can be a treasure trove and help missing meeting participants catch up. The integration between Stream and Teams is only getting better. It really takes very little effort to ensure the meeting minutes are backed by the meeting, fronted by rich search. Believe me, this is only going to get better. As a privacy best practice, remember to let participants know you’re starting the recording and that the meeting will be recorded.

4. Mute all & Controlling Sound

Muting is important, whether you are participating in large meetings or small. It’s courteous for participants to be on mute unless they are talking. This isn’t something that was commonplace in the past. But muting has gotten better with time. Plus, expectations are even higher these days for smooth meetings with less interruptions so many of us are jumping from online meeting to online meeting.

5. Video Backgrounds

It’s a great idea to leverage background blur. Better yet, consider providing employees with company background options featuring office locations, or options that leverage the company logo. It’s a fantastic opportunity to build internal branding and culture. What’s more, with all the online meetings these days, blending out the background can help with focus and privacy. The more people leverage custom backgrounds, the more likely others will do the same. “Together mode,” a new meetings feature, can bring all video participants into a single classroom style view, which makes it easier to pick up non-verbal queues from all participants. The scale is much greater, and the background is removed automatically.

Teams governance can be overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re doing or new to Teams.  I recently spoke at a webinar with Chris Barber in a webinar titled “Teams Governance & Automation.” We discussed the Teams platform and the teams application platform.

Teams has arrived at a time where users are ready for a tool that combines the power of communication and collaboration.  Teams as a platform promises to unite the plethora of productivity tools in a way where they are used just in time.  Why do we have so many interfaces?  The promise of the browser was designed to make it easier to consume our variety of enterprise applications.  Teams and the power platform help take that approach a step forward in a familiar combined Teams interface from the enterprise to our range of teams on down to the user for tasks.  This task-focused solution with consolidated teams and channels can help us reduce context switching.

Microsoft Teams: The Convergence of Communication Collaboration Wrapped in an Application Platform

More than ever before, there are so many tools and resources to show one how to gain control and empower the business in areas like adoption and governance.  Ultimately there are a few critical resources for not only getting started but also for getting your arms around. Teams can be a healthy Hub for modern teamwork.  When Teams is combined with the Power Platform and is used in this way with a partnership between the business and IT, it can provide a platform for business technology innovation.

Critical Resources for Teams App Platform Deployment & Governance

Teams Advisor – This is a built-in planner with tasks and plans, including progress tracking designed to help you, leverage Teams and Planner, to manage your rollout.

Microsoft Teams Customer Success Kit – This kit contains a wide range of presentations, email templates, tips & tricks, and posters that you can use to roll out and drive the adoption of Teams in your organization. It includes two quick-start guides for administrators and team leaders, and use case examples for every department.

App Templates – App templates are production-ready apps for Microsoft Teams that are community-driven, open-source, and available on GitHub. Each contains detailed instructions for deploying and installing that app for your organization, providing a ready-to-use app that you can install and begin using immediately.

Teams for Education – Quickstart for admins – tutorial for Teams deployment for the education organization.

Sample code for your own Teams Provisioning Templates in Graph – COE Power Platform Starter Kit – This will help you get your arms around the Teams as a Platform approach.  You need to know who is creating the apps, what connectors they are using, and manage them in environments.  Environments are critical to a multi-tiered approach to working with the business in a situation where the makers can do development, and IT can then work to deploy those resources as production apps.  Environments can be any variety of development, testing, staging, and production.  Going down the road of multi-tenant can add a lot of complexity for little to no added value.

Teams Provisioning App – Power Apps solution that automates the team creation process based on features and channel options.  From the approval process to streamlining provisioning. The embedded approval process for approval and/or rejection of requests with dashboards showing past and current requests with status for both IT and requestor.

Ideas app for Teams – employees submit and share ideas with voting and contests. An app using which employees can offer an innovative approach in a selected category to be visible to all colleagues and leadership, designs can be voted upon, and a leader board of best idea contributors can be shared.

Power Platform (COE) Center of Excellence Starter Kit – A Center of Excellence (CoE) in an organization drives innovation and improvement. It brings together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success, while at the same time providing standards, consistency, and governance to the organization.  This starter kit offers templates, configuration, guidance, and transparency of what is happening, including providing controls, alerting, and reporting.

> You can download the full presentation: Microsoft Teams Governance & Automation

Teams Governance Quick Reference Guide

It was interesting to find a number of the things that make Teams easier to govern inside of Azure AD Premium P1. Don’t be discouraged.  There are ways to work out provisioning in easy to build apps and if a group does get deleted there is a sort of archive or recycle bin where teams go for 30 days before they are permanently removed.  As a result, you should be more comfortable being a bit more aggressive on things like clean up and expiration.  The recording of the webinar did happen and will be posted to the Perficient site.

Questions or ideas?  Ping me on twitter @joeloleson or reach out at the upcoming global virtual community party on August 27.

If you’re reading this you’ve likely heard the news that both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 workflows days are limited.  In fact, just next month you’ll no longer be able to create your SharePoint Designer based workflows in a new tenant.  Chris McNulty, Sr Technical Product Manager from Microsoft provided the detail in an article about the end of life of SharePoint Workflows published on Monday.

I created a simple image to help simplify the news.

The community has not taken the news very well.  In fact, a User Voice has been created and already has 250 votes with the hope to postpone the dates.  I encouraged by many to vote to delay the timeline to support more time for people to complete the migration.

Denis Molodtsov makes some very compelling reasons to postpone.

Here are a few comments on his post that add to the need for postponement:

“This is not enough time. My group uses 2010 workflows in direct support to product sales. We need to be able to appropriately plan for this.”  “We will definitely need more than 4 months! Don’t set us up for failure.”

I highly recommend those impacted to reach out to Microsoft support.  There have already been some exceptions made for customers through official Microsoft support channels.

It’s not a surprise that Microsoft has chosen to deprecate the legacy workflows in SharePoint online, but instead people simply want time to include it in their budgets and plans.  Power Automate is now considered mature, fully featured and ready to take on the load from the legacy workflows.

That’s the story as of 7/8/2020.

–Joel Oleson

Reach out on linked in or your favorite social channel if you need a hand.  I hope to be putting together a webinar or at least a live video discussion for Q&A for those who may have questions.  Let me know in the comments what you prefer.

Additional References:

Announcement: https://aka.ms/sp-workflows-update

Support: https://aka.ms/sp-workflows-support

Migration Guidance: https://aka.ms/sp-workflows-guidance

In March, I was meeting with a group working on a conference that was designed to be a Microsoft MTC led event for Modern Workplace. We had a great team and some awesome speakers. Michael Gannotti and I kicked off the keynote with special callouts to Microsoft Teams usage on the front lines with virtual rounding solution by Max Fritz and the awesome Microsoft templates on crisis management and communication templates and apps.

It definitely woke me up to the importance of solutions for customers around work from home, as well as Teams 101 and the needs for people struggling with getting SharePoint in work-from-home scenarios and folks battling with VPNs. It was on a call with the speakers that one of them said that there are so many cancelled events and yet very few are going virtual.

They were calling out the need for more virtual events. Yes, the community needs opportunities to communicate, collaborate and share and inspire. The events aren’t just for education. There’s a lot more about networking, sharing, bouncing ideas off each other, and otherwise hanging out and sharing ideas and creating friendships. The virtual MVP summit was a lot of fun. Despite the real need to connect with other experts, it was the virtual happy hours and hanging out on video calls that a lot of folks were appreciating.

The birth of the Microsoft 365 Virtual Conference

It was out of this atmosphere, along with the need to transform an event in California that we were planning, that the Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon was born. We knew it was going to take a lot of work to make a successful virtual event, but we wanted to ensure that anyone in the world would be able to join. We did some math to figure out how many sessions we could do in a single Microsoft 365 tenant. According to our math at the time, we could do 15 sessions wide for 24 hours with 360 sessions.

“Why not go 36 hours so we could get two full days from the start and end with a SharePint?” we thought. It was out of that idea that the event was born. Since that time, we have been contacted by SharePoint Conference, gained alignment with Teams and Azure, and had conversations with both engineering and marketing teams at Microsoft to support more than a dozen sessions at the Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon.

Global connections

The most significant point in my mind is when we embraced the global nature of the event and truly decided to reach out to our contacts around the world to support speakers from around the globe. In total, we expect to have over 10,000 attendees from 115+ countries, with sessions delivered in seven languages across 400 sessions from 330 speakers that come from 44 different countries.

The conversations with the Latin American Spanish speaking MVPs was familiar, and I knew they would be on board. Then it was French Canadiens and French Azure Office 365 community and ensuring French content from Lebanon to Tahiti and New Caledonia. German was a late addition. Our German speakers are very talented and most were willing to deliver their sessions in both English and German. Reaching out to contacts in places like India, Pakistan, Egypt, Dubai, Senegal, Nigeria, and South Africa was important. It’s not just about Western Europe but Eastern Europe, Africa from top to bottom. Asia, from Turkey to Japan.

It was conversations with the Japanese and Korean community leadership where I felt a special connection on how meaningful the event was to these communities. I had a very heartfelt conversation with the Japanese community lead who had shared that this was the first time they’d had such an engagement. While they could have their own event, it is absolutely meaningful to have a global event with foreign language tracks.

I was told that this is what inclusion and diversity feels like. I agree. We’ve tried to reach out to communities in every country in the world. I’m hoping to hear stories about the new Teams features that allow closed captions to be translated into local languages. I’m anxious to hear how our foreign language sessions are received.

Providing a space to gather while apart

While physical events have expo halls and community parties and gatherings, it takes a lot of special attention to even get close to mimicking those features. We’re working hard to provide VR community gatherings, video chat happy hours, and vendor rooms with an incredible raffle prizes that encourage attendees to visit the vendors and become aware of what this powerful ecosystem provides. The sponsor money raised is helping us provide marketing, raffle prize of Oculus Quest VR , and a 10% special fund provided to help families in the community of those impacted by COVID-19.

I’m excited to have Perficient on board as a Diamond sponsor. It’s so great to get the marketing and delivery teams energized and supporting the community with expert speakers. Perficient has been very busy helping companies in their digital transformation and has as well been working near the front lines in healthcare, supporting hospitals doctors and nurses with a healthcare bot, implementing crisis management solutions, and utilizing innovative communication portals and news portals to help hospitals keep their employees informed.

Emergency network troubleshooting with network performance and VPN overload has been just some of the challenges that Perficient has been involved in solving, in addition to Skype for Business to Teams transitions. In that space, we’ve been involved in multiple Teams Summits helping educate customers across the nation in their adoption, migration, and deployment strategies to move to Microsoft Teams.

What I’m looking forward to at the Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon

Personally, I’m very excited about the Microsoft energy around Microsoft SharePoint Spaces and Microsoft Project Cortex. I see Project Cortex as AI for the masses, as well as a reboot of knowledge management and a doubling down on SharePoint as the best repository of corporate knowledge. It’s great to see the Microsoft content management strategy coming full circle and embracing a wholistic approach to knowledge management. Lots of work in the Power Platform integrates right into the Project Cortex platform as a horizontal service providing integrated knowledge solutions across SharePoint, Teams, Office, Outlook, Yammer, and more. You’ll find me diving into these topics in my sessions.

I set up the VR in our house early in lockdown. My son asked me for a vacation simulator. Brilliant! Since that moment, I’ve been trying to incorporate VR activities into my community outreach. Bill Baer’s SharePints have been so extremely popular he’s had hundreds of people joining a video call designed for a handful of people, but it’s been a riot! Our emphasis on VR and mixed reality support in the event serve as a mechanism to connect the community with support for watching the keynotes and providing a space to connect and network for those who have headsets. I’m hoping the Oculus Quest All-in-One VR giveaways can also be meaningful.

Here are the sessions you can expect from the Perficient delivery team:

• Preparing for Project Cortex – Joel Oleson – 5 p.m. (CDT) Wednesday May 27
• Our Challenge: Women’s Representation, Inclusion, and What You Can Do About It – Venice Thacker – 5 p.m. Wednesday May 27
• Power Up Your Resume with Power Query – Venice Thacker – 8 p.m. Wednesday May 27
• Teams Real-Life Integration – Automation & Governance – Chris Barber – Noon Thursday May 28
• Project Cortex: AI-Powered Knowledge Network – Joel Oleson and Ross Leher – 5 p.m. Thursday May 28

You can register for the conference by following this link.

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“Skype for Business Islands mode sucks!” is what I was thinking of titling this post, but I wasn’t sure how well that would sit on the Perficient blog. Admiral Ackbar is right, “It’s a TRAP!”

Skype for Business to Teams Migration Overview

The migration from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams is unlike any migration you’ve ever done in the past.  First it’s less about migrating content as the chats simply won’t move.  Second, it’s more about adoption and change management for enabling users and helping them understand what has changed.  Learning about Teams and how it works is something that may be better suited for a hands on workshop where users can see the technology and ask questions, and then leveraging a champions program where users know they can reach out for tips and tricks.

Teams is more than Skype – It’s an Iceberg of Hidden functionality

Skype for Business is not equal to Teams.  Teams has a lot more features and functionality.  Expecting your users to “just figure it out” isn’t a feasible plan.  You’ll also find that leveraging the telecom team exclusively won’t ensure proper adoption and the storage, apps, integration and collaboration parts of Teams do require some planning.

Thinking Islands Mode is a Solution is a Mistake

There are a number of mistakes that are frequently made in the transition or migration from Skype for Business to Teams.  First the default experience of islands mode where both toolsets are available to all users may sound like a good thing.  It’s not.  You don’t want to run both Skype and Teams for an extended period of time.  It’s better when you’re ready to start the transition to leverage the other coexistence modes of supporting Teams for Collaboration and possibly using Teams for Meetings as well.  In islands mode users have both clients installed and often IT is relying on users to install the Teams client as it will automatically download if a user has a meeting on Teams.

Don’t Forget Client Updates

Key considerations in migration include the Teams client install, the mobile client and the often overlooked add-in for Outlook which makes it easier to schedule meetings.  It should also replace the Skype for business Outlook add-in.  Which add-in does a user have when they are setting up the meeting?  That client experience for the users who setup most meetings… it’s mass confusion when users are getting both Skype for Business meetings and Teams meetings for a long period of time.  This transition phase should be short and guidance and training or at a minimum a planned adoption strategy.

“Islands mode: By default, users can run Teams alongside Skype for Business as two separate solutions that deliver similar and overlapping capabilities such as presence, chat, calling, and meetings. Teams users also can take advantage of new collaboration capabilities such as teams and channels, access to files in Office 365, and applications.”

Do your research and understand that “islands mode,” the default is more confusing for users.  I’m not the first one to mention this.  When Microsoft first published some of their documentation it was not as clear.  Now that the community has had a chance to chew on it… the lights are turned on and it’s more obvious to see that islands mode, the default is the worst state to remain in.

Get out of Islands Mode:

• Erwin Bierens, “Get the hell out of Islands Mode-Sharing Knowledge”
• Johan Delimon agrees “Avoid the Microsoft Teams “Islands Mode” Trap”
• Regarding 365 “Beware of the Island: Understanding Teams and Skype …”
• Practical 365 “Configuring Teams Only Mode: However, in Islands mode we will allow users to access Teams and perform IM, chat and calls between each other; but those conversations won’t flow between Skype and Teams users”

I also like this quote from Lync Dude, “What happens on Skype for Business stays in Skype for Business and the chat that happens on Teams stays in Teams.”  Sounds just fine right?  Wrong it’s the worst mode.

No Plan is Planning to Fail

Islands mode turns out to be a real problem as most companies just turn on Microsoft Teams without properly planning their journey from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.  This results in unhappy users because of feature overlap and no interoperability between both communication and collaboration tools. The teams chats stay in Teams and the Skype chats stay in Skype for biz.  So users have to look in both places and the presence is only on for Skype for Business… Did I mention it was chaos?

Don’t leave it up to your users… it’s chaos for everyone when you say.  We’ll give these next two years for the users to figure it out and think you’re being helpful.  It’s not.  If you consciously decide to use the islands mode it should be short.  What that means is don’t leave your users in la la land for an extended period of time not knowing which tool to use and what they should be doing.  It’s not fun.  Of course people will use what tools they prefer, and it’s necessary to help the organization in their transition, but islands mode is NOT the right way to make this smooth.

In fact, the biggest problem with “Islands Mode” is that both Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams are actually “Islands”.  They have nothing to do with each other and are completely disconnected, users will experience a set of inconsistent behaviors in both Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.  I’ve heard this called the lazy admin approach and it’s done at the expense of and without caring about the End-Users, this mode basically puts all the responsibilities to properly communicate on the End-User.

Islands Mode also blocks the ability for a user to fully test Microsoft Teams as this mode still forces the user Skype for Business for Presence as well as incoming PSTN calls and Federated conversations all land in Skype for Business.  Many think this is the right way to approach on premise Skype to online Teams.  Not true, again it feels like a lack of planning and is a poor experience for those moving from Skype for Business with Enterprise Voice to Teams.

Introducing SFBO to Teams Coexistence Modes

The beginning of the journey is either Skype for Business only or Islands mode and islands is chaos and a trap as I said.  The end of the journey is Teams only and that should absolutely be your goal to get there as quickly as you safely can.  The best way to get there is to choose what’s best for your company.  That should be choosing between “ripping off the band aid” with an approach of taking groups of users straight to teams only with a solid training and adoption program, and likely for those with a lot of usage of skype in a coexistence mode of Skype for Business with Teams Collaboration or Skype for Business with Teams Collaboration with Meetings. The mistakes that can be made are planning for a year of overlap and a very slow path with lots of time in islands mode.

Configuring Coexistence Modes

Teams admin has a single global setting where you can configure your entire Organization coexistence mode at once.  Set the “Organization Wide Settings > Teams Upgrade Mode”.  If you are using Skype for Business On-Premises and want to Upgrade to Teams you may want to choose “Skype for Business with Teams Collaboration” for everyone and configure your Teams (pilot) users with a user specific upgrade mode of “Teams Only.” Keep in mind that Voice configuration may require other modes to be configured).  This way users will not get confused when you introduce Microsoft Teams in your Organization, users that get the Organization Wide setting are automatically configured with the right Upgrade Mode until they start using Microsoft Teams.

Getting to Microsoft Teams Migration Approaches

Recommended Migration Approaches and Practical Guidance

What do I recommend?  I recommend an approach where you setup your pilot an early adopter group in get your pilot users on Teams Only with the rest of the business moved to “Skype for Business with Teams Collaboration.”  If your conference rooms are ready I recommend going straight to “Skype for Business with Teams Collaboration and Meetings.”  Then once they are acclimated and the pilot is successful, you then look to getting the company on Teams only.  The hesitations in your migration come from making sure the calling plans, the conference calling #s and conference room readiness, where you’re going to want a slower transition for those that actually use the soft phones and calling plans in which case you’ll take the multi step approach as you decide your approach for PSTNs and calling plans in Office 365/Microsoft 365, but this doesn’t keep you from getting to Skype for Business with Teams Collaboration where the meetings can really be on either technology.  Don’t forget the outlook plugins.  That’s ultimately how you can start the transition by enabling your managers and project managers.  You don’t need to be in islands to have that functionality.

If you enjoyed these visuals you can download them as a single infographic like the one above.  You have permission to use these in your slide decks and blogs with creative commons share alike.

Download Skype for Business to Teams Infographic

Right click and “save as” on any of the images above or click to download the Skype to Teams Coexistence and Migration Infographic as a PDF.  These images were created for the use of the community and customers to help you in your transition.

Looking for help in the transition or on Teams projects?  We’ve got a full team with deep experience on the calling plans, network optimization, Teams maturity with Power Platform integration.  Reach out!  I’m easy to find on most social media platforms especially LinkedIn.

We are working on scheduling our next Teams Summit, but in the meantime I’d love to invite you to join me and the community in the largest global community event ever attempted with hundreds of speakers and sessions.  We are working on 36 hour Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon with top speakers from all over the planet including sessions spoken natively in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Japanese!  We have more than a dozen sessions from Microsoft HQ including Keynote sessions from Jeff Teper, CVP, Naomi Moneypenny, Bill Baer, Jon Levesque, Laurie Pottmeyer, and Michael Holste.  More detail at http://m365virtualmarathon.com

Thanks,

-Joel Oleson, MVP & RD

Director in the Microsoft Practice at Perficient

@joeloleson

What if you had a Wikipedia of all of the topics that are being discussed at work? How would that change your productivity?

Imagine a place that had an explanation for the acronyms, pages with information about the projects and processes at work linked to the experts, files, meetings. Imagine a way to navigate who the experts were and what they were actually working on beyond a one liner, but actually links to the most recent and trending documents of the organization. Very powerful!

In a world where it requires users to do the tagging and the posting, it’s unlikely to be a reality, but with Project Cortex a powerful Knowledge Network built with AI and the Microsoft Graph extending the schema which connects people, processes, to the files and documents and conversations. Project Cortex is not simply a behind the scenes API or service, it has two centers for interacting the Knowledge Center and the Content Center.

Knowledge Center

The Knowledge Center is primarily AI generated machine learning based Wikipedia like catalog of Topics and which provides navigation across the topics that you’re following, those that are trending, and active collaboration is happening with the colleagues you work with most. You don’t need to do much to see the value in this space. The AI reasons over the content to provide rich topics that can be easily navigated in an ontology, through search or appearing right in the tools you use every day. Content is indexed and AI reasons over the content using machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to suggest relevant topics that can be curated and validated by experts of your choosing. These recommendations are simply candidates. All content including the topics are security trimmed and controlled with recommendations of trimming the content to that which is not sensitive. You can exclude sensitive content for example and create a blacklist of topics you don’t want to be recommended. In addition, topics can also be included from content that is connected using Microsoft Search connectors for content outside of Microsoft 365. This rich array of topics in the knowledge center are connected to the productivity tools of Microsoft 365, so seeing intuitive highlights in Outlook, Office, SharePoint and Teams can educate and inform and connect the people to their projects and processes happen.

Content Center

The Content Center is a familiar interface for uploading content with an emphasis on Machine Teaching. You can set up document models for and create multiple content centers which are essentially groups of document libraries, invoking AI Builder process automation and uploading sample structured documents and train models.  Train the AI on a variety of structured documents and choose fields for extraction then setting up automated extraction with Power Automate and setting up workflows and various business processes. In addition you can easily integrate the feature rich integration of the Microsoft Power Platform tools such as Forms, PowerApps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents to integrate with hundreds of other apps and APIs or provide workstreams in either SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

Reinforcement 

Reinforcement provides the ability to provide seeding of topics or to add taxonomy terms.  Taxonomy terms are not required, but can be useful to provide industry terms and seeding of topics.  Experts provide validation on suggested Topics and ultimately manage what is published to either center. The admin interface can be used to add lists for blocking Topics or to add new Topics. Mining can be managed to exclude content based on sensitivity.

-Joel Oleson, MVP & RD
Director @ Perficient
@joeloleson

Interesting? I think so. If you want to learn more about this new service from Microsoft people tune in to my webinar on April 16.

Microsoft announced Project Cortex at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando earlier this month.  While there were literally hundreds of announcements, the biggest announcement was Project Cortex.

What is it?

Project Cortex will create and update new topic pages and knowledge centers that are meant to act like wikis. Topic cards will be available to users in Outlook, Teams and Office. Cortex builds on top of Microsoft Cognitive services for image and text recognition, forms processing and machine teaching with LUIS, language understanding.

At the heart of Project Cortex is a much improved and largely AI driven managed metadata service which enables tagging and more across much of Microsoft 365. Cortex will leverage the Microsoft Search service in connecting to third-party repositories through connectors which already are available for Windows File Share, ServiceNow, SQL Database, Intranet Websites, MediaWiki, Azure Data Lake Gen2, Salesforce and is extensible.

Those paying attention to Microsoft technologies about 15 years ago may remember a pilot of a tool called Knowledge Network.  This tool would analyze your email for keywords and people with a plan to help you organize your content around a network.  It was clever. It gave you insights about who you were working with and could make recommendations. Ultimately the project was abandoned, likely due to process intense desktop app with an already process heavy outlook app.  While it was improving search and retrieval in Outlook and may have provided insights, Microsoft no longer supported the app in favor of other backend improvements and effort.  They pursued enterprise metadata stores which had promise, but many would say have yet to deliver on the promise of rich enterprise metadata taxonomies for a dozen reasons.  For the last dozen years, the pressure has been on building content types, and asking users to populate metadata columns, keywords, and tags. This has largely gone unused in most organizations.

The main difference between managed metadata and this new knowledge network provided by Project Cortex is the promise of a AI driven backed by crowd sourced folksonomy, largely driven not by a small group of people, but through the content creators.  Artificial Intelligence does the heavy lifting and is then validated by those creating the content or tasked to manage the approvals.  This UI and experience hasn’t been shared yet beyond demos and in the expo hall at Microsoft Ignite. Currently, it is only available to those in the very limited private preview.  The program is expanding with more coming in 2020.

The promise now is the ability to have a large corpus of knowledge that is captured and built upon in a true enterprise wiki. Not much unlike Wikipedia, but largely driven based on the content created by the organization and categorized, extracted, cataloged and automatically connected to the enterprise corpus through highlighted topics.  Imagine all of the automatic and intelligence that is driven not by the arduous effort of end users through manual keywords, columns, and metadata tagging, but through automatic extraction, machine teaching, machine learning, and the best of Microsoft Research built on the back of Office 365 which is populated not just by SharePoint alone but Outlook, Teams, Planner, Stream, Project, Tasks and so on.

It doesn’t end there.  The promise is just as your data in external SaaS storage such as Box and Dropbox can also be cataloged, extracted, enriched and linked by this same enterprise wiki of topic cards retrieved by enterprise search, and exposed in the documents themselves, in interactions in Word, Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and so on.

Why should you care?

Imagine you’re scanning your invoices and storing them in SharePoint.  Prior to Project Cortex, this largely would have provided you with some PDFs stored in a SharePoint library. Thanks to the efforts of the cloud, you would already have a much better experience than in the past due to indexing of the PDFs even if they’re only images, but also extraction of keywords.  Project Cortex with machine teaching could extract customer names, addresses, invoice numbers, amounts, validation of the scans and this content not only would populate in relevant columns, but also know what a customer is, and highlight in the document where when you click on it could take you to an information card which then when clicked take you to a rich page with relationships spidering out to show locations, offices, people, industries, topics and so on based on both validated and extracted relationships in the data.  The possibilities are exciting as today you often don’t know what you have.  You definitely don’t know what questions to ask of your data. Imagine and AI that wants to make sense of both your structured and unstructured data to build relationships around it.  There is industry knowledge and taxonomies that could have vastly important impact on this.

Why do these knowledge networks, taxonomies, and structured managed metadata and tagging projects fail? 

Time, effort, consensus, enterprise skills, budgets, staying power and abilities to sustain such a vast project…Dozens of reasons that come down to the need for someone that has the backing and skillset to sustain such a vastly important and critical project.  It also relies on the individuals to fill in the metadata and even if you had already paid hundreds of thousands of dollars today to use cloud extraction programs your ability to do it cross platform would be limited.

Why is Project Cortex different? 

Project Cortex has such an incredible handle on the key elements to not only automate, but to support it long term as users see the immense value immediately.  The difference is in the power of the cloud, power of artificial intelligence and the fact that Microsoft 365 is so well connected now than ever before.  This can be successful and it will change the way we look at our content. You’re not just uploading a document that sits in a library.  Your adding to an enterprise corpus.  Remember that insightful quote from the CIO of HP?  “Imagine if HP only knew what HP knows it could be twice as successful.”  I truly see Project Cortex in that light.  Microsoft with cloud and AI improvements delivered in Project Cortex hopes to deliver on the promise of helping unlock organizational knowledge in just that way.  What could John Hopkins know if it knew what it knows?  What would that do for medicine?  What could Kroger do with access to it’s knowledge?

On the surface this means quicker ramp up for employees who don’t know the projects, products, customers and services. It also allows long time employees to more easily provide knowledge, insights, and incrementally help connect things by validating what the AI is seeing as relationships in the data, content, and business data.  Unlocking the enterprise knowledge to a level of helping and providing insights at a level of expansiveness never thought possible.  This is big. Yes, it changes everything.

If you’re looking to get started looking at something like this, reach out to me.  I’d love to help you get connected with Microsoft there are a few charter organizations that can support customers and we are the one.  Let’s talk.  I’m excited to get started, and I want to work with you.

You may not have realized it, but the Teams team at Microsoft has been working furiously to deliver some of the most highly requested features. Some upcoming features were announced at MSIgnite, and these are game changers. 

Microsoft Teams Chat Pop Outs

Now you can chat with multiple different people while you are still working on your document without multiple screens.  This was in the top requested features on user voice. 

Not only chats, but even the video can now be in one area, while you can still access your content in Teams.  If you’re like me, you’ve ended a few calls by trying to pull up a document in another tenant and killed your connection by accident.  Now Teams content no longer has to be all tied in with the meeting. 

Video Improvements

The video itself can be resized and you can continue to work in teams such as viewing your calendar.

Your ability to change the background in video chats can REALLY help when working remotely.  Instead of just a blur which was cool.  You can now add yourself to a conference room or a pristine office environment or play around by making it seem like you’re on an island.  This helps with company culture, this helps with encouraging people to do video even though they may be at an airport, kiosk, or in an unfamiliar environment where who knows when a child or puppy could popup such as in a home office environment.

Not only that but being able to have simultaneous subtitles displaying while you’re talking to someone can make it much easier for those working not in their first language, but also due to a noisy environment.  There were some amazing features for cleaning up videos and audio that were demoed at Ignite as well.

Interoperability with WebEx and Zoom

Microsoft understands that meetings aren’t heterogeneous.  WebEx, Zoom, and Microsoft have come together to provide interoperability to their web experiences.

Your meetings may be in Teams, Zoom, or WebEx and now your conference rooms should have a much easier time being able to support the video, screen sharing, the calling and dial in experience.  This is HUGE.

Managed Meeting Rooms

Microsoft has provided manageability features for being able to monitor the health of conference rooms and is even rolling out a service to help with meetings and conference room support.

Thinking about how Teams can Change your organization?

Check out our Build Your Modern Workplace Hub with Microsoft Teams Webinar taking place December 5th, here’s a link to register today. We’ll also be hosting Teams and Adoption Change Management Summits in Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas and Silicon Valley beginning in January 2020. Details coming soon!