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We discuss:
- Viva – Introducing Microsoft Viva, the Employee Experience Platform in Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Tech Community
- Satin – the new Teams codec
- Satin: Microsoft’s latest AI-powered audio codec for real-time communications
- Fluent Version of Teams Desktop and Browser UI Rolling Out
- You can now start an ad-hoc #MicrosoftTeams meeting from the Outlook desktop client via the new “Meet Now” button in the calendar
- Microsoft Teams: 25K person teams – rolling out now
- PowerShell change
- Microsoft Ignite is coming, some highlights:
- The Hybrid Workplace – Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, Modern Work
- The Latest Innovations with Microsoft Teams – Nicole Herskowitz, General Manager, Microsoft Teams Marketing
- Secure and Compliant Collaboration with Microsoft Teams – John Gruszczyk, Product Marketing Manager; and Mansoor Malik, Principal General Product Manager
Other mentions:
- CX Today Launch Event– 2 DAY EVENT
- We have a session called Building a Contact Centre with MS Teams featuring Landis Technologies, Luware and Geomant.
Microsoft Teams Predictions 2021 – Watch now.
2020 was a definitive year for Microsoft Teams, with an astonishing number of features released across the year and daily active user numbers crossing a massive 115 million. It is a truly remarkable feat for a collaboration platform that’s been around for just 3 years. Add to that Microsoft’s attempt to position Teams as the central hub for its entire collaboration technology spectrum. From teaming up with competitors like Cisco to venturing into new hardware territory, Microsoft isn’t leaving any stone unturned when it comes to giving Teams the best chances for market domination.
Now coming to the elephant in the room – can Microsoft continue Teams’ meteoric growth now that several global economies are looking to exit the lockdown and 100% WFH stage? How does it plan to pivot, building on last year’s momentum but refreshing its value proposition? To answer these questions, I once again sit down with our good friend, UC Solutions Architect, Microsoft Certified Master, and MVP, Tom Arbuthnot, for an exhaustive fireside chat. Scroll down to read what’s new with Microsoft Teams in March and what to expect from the collaboration behemoth next.
A little bit about Microsoft’s employee experience product
We previously reported on Microsoft Viva, the company’s new employee experience platform that can be accessed through Teams. With Viva, Microsoft intends to target the non-IT spectrum of users and decision-makers, and HR is a big part of that conversation. Tom demystified what exactly Vive is and does it really fill a market gap?
“Viva is Microsoft’s new employee experience platform. It’s a new kind of name or a brand they’re putting around various different experiences. You don’t buy Viva as a thing, but Viva is more like a family of offerings all around this whole theme of HR in the new normal. Now that we’re all remote, how do you drive culture, cohesiveness, drive training, learning communications, that kind of thing? It’s a real big gap that needs to be addressed, to be fair,” said Tom.
There are four prongs to Viva:
- “Viva Connections is to bring your employees together with news and communications”
- “Viva Insights offers analytics insights on how your employee experience is – not in a big brother-y way, but how are people engaged and enabling you to report on people’s experiences”
- “Viva Learning is your classic learning portal, which looks like it’s mostly pulling in third-party learning content into a centralised portal”
- “Viva Topics is an AI that finds the conversations going on inside your business”
These are all in various stages of preview or planned, and may not be available for everyone immediately.
“Like everything in the cloud, it’ll be an evolving story. The most important thing is Microsoft breaking out making it an IT conversation into a culture conversation. Yes, we’re providing the tooling, but we don’t want to talk to IT about deploying this. We want to talk to whoever is the digital transformation or the HR person is – that’s the mindset,” Tom told us.
Skype is dead; long live Skype codec
Next, we spoke about a brand-new Codec from Microsoft that will use AI for real-time audio communication – but is it brand new, really? Tom mentioned that the new Codec, Satin, is a direct successor to Skype Codec, Silk. It probably isn’t a coincidence that the company acquired Skype exactly a decade back, in 2011.
“Codec is the thing that encodes your audio or your video before sending it over the internet. The better the Codec, the better performance you get. It’s an ongoing conversation in the UC community about who is equipped to best deal with bad networks, especially because we’re all using mobile, 4G, 5G, which can be patchy. Having good Codecs is equivalent to having a good user experience,” Tom explained.
“Microsoft bought Skype way back in the day and they inherited the Silk Codec. Satin is the next generation of that Codec: they’re throwing lots of AI cleverness at it, but the punchline is you’re getting better voice quality in more challenging network conditions. um, so Microsoft has a great blog where they compare the two. It’s night and day – for example, the ability to hear individual words but also to keep it wide-band. At the moment, all the audio is pretty poor, adding to meeting fatigue. Having Codecs that can counteract those network conditions is crucial.”
We have seen this play out in the Teams vs Zoom conversation as lots of people feel oh, but Zoom is just better, without really understanding the technicals. Often, it boils down to how we deal with bad network conditions, so this is a big step forward for Teams.
Say hello to a (barely) new desktop and browser UI
Microsoft has a user interface overhaul planned that’s more like a subtle, nuanced change than an overnight transformation. “Credit to Tony Redmond, who did a really good blog on this,” Tom commented. Microsoft calls the new experience its Fluent version, which will be gradually available across countries for users who turn on Preview mode.
“Microsoft is constantly trying to bring Office 365 and the Microsoft 365 experiences together in terms of look and feel. This is Teams adding a bunch of iconography and experience stuff that is in line with that philosophy. So not a massive change in the grand scheme of things, but some nice new icons and look-and-feels, which are rolling out at the moment,” said Tom.
A handy update for Outlook fans
As remote work becomes more and more entrenched (a lot of companies plan to stay with a hybrid model even in 2022), meeting culture will also change. A big part of this is the shift from pre-scheduled meetings to impromptu or spontaneous conversations that turn into meetings. Skype has always had this ability, equipped with a Meet Now button and the Teams desktop client can generate meeting URLs on the fly as well.
“Now that ability, as a button, has been put in Outlook,” said Tom. “You can hit one button to generate a meeting and you can then have people join that meeting. Honestly, this really shows how dominant Outlook is as an interface for most people. You can already do this in the Teams client, but because Outlook is front and centre for so many people, adding that button makes it more discoverable, more visible, more used. I have no doubt Microsoft is looking at the analytics and saying, oh look if we put a button here that says Meet Now, more people are likely to click that to generate a meeting.”
One thing that jumped out to me as a result of this conversation is the absence of a personal meeting room in Teams. “You know, you just have a fixed URL that you can just share with people. I know Zoom and a few other big video conferencing and meeting providers offer that,” I pointed out.
Tom opined that security concerns could be a reason why Microsoft is yet to add a permanent link capability to Teams meetings.
“From a security standpoint, it’s interesting because you’re sharing a permanent space that people could conceptually camp in. So, it was always hated from a security standpoint. But from a user experience standpoint, we heard a lot of execs love it because of the flexibility it offers. For example, they’re on a mobile at the airport and they’re like, okay everybody, jump on my bridge right now, we’re going to make this thing happen. There’s a tension there between user experience and security.”
Teams go big(ger)
During last year’s Ignite, Microsoft had announced that an extension of a single team’s members on Teams would soon be extended to 25,000. It seems incredibly high to me at the time, not sure about the use case there, and Tom agrees. “This is an interesting one from my point of view, because what’s the collaboration scenario where you need 25000 people all in the same space?!” he said.
“But clearly, the demand is there for these scenarios in large enterprises, so Microsoft is now pushing up to 25000 members in a single team!”
Of course, there have to be checks and balances in place to prevent the UX from going out of control and becoming too cluttered, to the point of becoming counterproductive. “You have lots of controls to configure so only owners can post. You can specify threads that can’t be replied to. You can lock it all down into becoming more or less a broadcast channel – but I don’t know how much of this is pushing technical barriers for technical barriers’ sake and how much this is big customers wanting it,” said Tom.
One would do it very going to carefully when building a team that big and controlled because there’s always a risk that it will either end up being so big it’s not used, or so big it’s just permanent noise.
On an interesting aside, I also wondered if you could call everyone!
“Sometimes, just by mistake you know, you end pressing the call button and it rings everyone in the group!!” I told Tom. “Well, there is a UI experiment where they’ve added a prompt “Are you sure you want to call this group,” because that definitely happened! It’s like the 2021 version of the “Reply All” problem,” he replied.
Next, I wanted to talk a little bit about PowerShell and its recent time in the sun.
Tidying up PowerShell for Skype’s retirement
PowerShell for Teams was always available, but Microsoft has made a practice of prioritising its GUI and web controls, with PowerShell coming second. However, as Skype for Business retires, its PowerShell functionality will now be subsumed by Teams PowerShell, giving it some much needed time in the sun.
“I personally love PowerShell,” Tom said. “I think editing and controlling configurations via command line is much more flexible and auditable than messing around with the UI. But that philosophy is not always shared with Microsoft. For Microsoft, UI and the web control panel come first. But now, as we march on to the retirement of Skype for Business online, all the Skype online PowerShell functionalities have fallen into the Teams PowerShell module, making it more robust. For example, now, if you want to control voice elements, you only need the PowerShell module now for Teams.”
2 events for your March calendar
To begin with, Microsoft Ignite 2021 is already underway and you can follow all the latest news coverage right here. If last year’s event is anything to go by, we can expect a ton of new features and capability additions set up for the next few months.
I asked Tom what’s on the top of his list for the event.
“There’s a whole bunch of great sessions and round tables. There’s a hybrid workspace one from Jared Spataro, who is Corporate Vice President, Microsoft. That’s kind of the keynote of the modern workplace experience. There is the latest innovation with Microsoft Teams session to watch for if you care about Teams – because that’s going to be the classic “here’s all our new shiny stuff around Teams” discussion. And then, there’s a dedicated session on secure and compliant collaboration with Microsoft Teams,” Tom shared his recommendations.
“I mean we’ll talk about Ignite after the event but you can see the tone here is about: Teams is better not just because there are more features, but because we have this massive cloud of compliance and identity management and security and audit. I think this is a smart move from Microsoft as a way for differentiating Teams. It’s not just crazy clever backgrounds (other products have crazy clever backgrounds) and we can do 10,000 people in a meeting (someone else can 11,000 people in the meeting). Those are table stakes – but security, compliance, governance, and control is where Microsoft really shines,” he further explained.
Do watch this space for our Microsoft Ignite 2021 roundup article, where we bring you a curated list of the top updates, news headlines, and feature announcements from the event.
Also on the cards is an event from the UC Today team – the launch of CX Today, our new media brand for helping you make the most of your customer experience offerings.
The launch event also includes a session on how to build a contact centre with Microsoft Teams, featuring experts from Landis Technologies, Luware, and Geomant. “Matt and the Luware guys know everything there is to know about Teams Contact Center so that sounds like a great panel,” Tom chimed in.
For more Microsoft Teams opinion and news, check out our articles with Microsoft tag and visit TomTalks.
On that note, we close our conversation on Microsoft Teams news for March. We’ll be sharing regular updates from Ignite across the upcoming days, so stay tuned. A hearty thank you to Tom, as always, for letting us pick his brain. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and remember to press the bell icon to never miss another update from UC Today. Share with Teams users, fans, and enthusiasts to spread the word.
Thanks for reading!
