Microsoft Teams Digital Employee Experience Nirvana
- LiveTiles
- May 28, 2020
- Blog
We’re living in a world where our roles are increasingly more reliant on other roles in order to achieve not only what we need, but how our organization is trying to improve the digital employee experience. We sat down with Microsoft Product Marketing Manager, Jas Basra, to discover what Microsoft Teams has to offer.
Highlights from the podcast
Implementing Microsoft Teams isn’t going to solve a collaboration issue for you right away, but building up the use cases and helping your users understand how they can use the platform to collaborate and understanding their business needs.
- Is Teams going to be used for an internal-only audience?
- Do users need to collaborate with external people?
- Are the right policies in place to support that?
- Do you have a governance plan built into your adoption plan?
- What do you need to improve the digital employee experience?
One of the key elements of rolling out Microsoft Teams effectively is ensuring that you have executive sponsorship. How does it relate to your organisation’s broader business objectives and goals, so that you have the support needed to drive it across the organization.
Listen to the full podcast or watch the video below.
| Chris: | Thank you very much for joining us here today. We’ve got a packed house here today, which is great to see. Obviously, Microsoft Teams at this time is a hot topic for everybody out there, so it’s great to see some familiar names returning for another one of these sessions. Fantastic. Thank you very much for your support.
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| Today we’re going to talk about Microsoft Teams, where it’s going, share some great customer stories around some of the successes that we’ve seen through Jas, who’s from Microsoft. And then we’ll talk a little bit about where it’s going and then how LiveTiles can support with getting it implemented in your business. I’ll start the presentation here. That will flick over now. Beautiful work. I’ll introduce the two of us. As usual, you have me, Chris Lukianenko, the host of the Intelligent Workplace Podcast. And joining me here on … You can see on the screen, here is Jas Basra, product marketing manager from Microsoft. Jas has been with Microsoft for five years and is described as the next level team ship ninja. Jas, I’ve got no idea what that means. Can you describe that to us? Explain it.
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| Jas: | Yeah, sure. I think I’m the only person in the world with that title, I hope. I was the last time that I checked. It’s interesting. A couple of years ago, I did a bit of a reflection on where I’m at in my career and why I connected so strongly with this notion around teamwork. And I realized it’s actually because every job and industry I’ve ever worked in, has been a hundred percent reliant on a team to actually accomplish anything. And so ever since then, I’ve really been working in this role and other roles to continually master this craft of teamwork and teach it. And I like to think that through that, I’m taking it to the next level, so there you go.
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| Chris: | Fair enough. Fair enough. You win, good stuff. And your role at Microsoft?
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| Jas: | Yeah. I’m a product marketing manager, which really means I work really closely with our sellers and partners, such as LiveTiles, to support our customers through the adoption of our technology and really help them get the most out a product. For me, that’s Microsoft Teams. And supporting with everything from adoption to feedback on new features and how it can really help make sure that they’re getting the results they need from the product for their organization.
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| Chris: | Excellent, which is the exact reason why you’re sitting here with me today, virtually across the world. Great stuff. The about us slide, I’ve been sharing this quite a few times. If you’re a return guest, you will have seen this a few times. This is us, a global company specializing in employee collaboration and communication software and services. And we’re in a number of locations. I’ll quickly flick through that one.
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| Let’s get to the agenda. What are we going to cover today? Well, again, as I say every week, this isn’t a lecture, it’s a conversation, it’s interactive. Ask the questions that you want to ask. There’s the option there in the software to be able to ping up a question for me or Jas and I can ask answer or ask them on your behalf. Or if you want to take it offline at the end of this session, more than happy to chat with you after that. You will have our email addresses at the end of this and yeah, fire away.
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| Today, what we’re going to look at is the latest, so I’ll get Jas to update us on what’s been happening in the world of Microsoft Teams of late, the numbers, the updates, that sort of thing. And then we’ll move into some of Jas’s must do tips for reaching Microsoft Teams, Nirvana.
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| And then the next one is what I’m really looking forward to, is which is the customer story. Jas’s got a couple of great ones to share with us. They’re in and around the whole COVID-19 issue. If we have time, I might even share one from our company as well.
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| Next up, we’ll get Jas to talk about some of the great ideas that have been thrown around inside Microsoft for Teams and where that platform is heading. And then finally, I’ll give you a bit of a rundown on how Microsoft … Sorry, how LiveTiles could help you with implementing Microsoft Teams, no matter where you are in terms of your Teams journey. There was a question here from Chris Murphy, “Why aren’t you doing this via a Teams live event?”
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| We were just talking about that before we jumped on here. LiveTiles has been using GoToWebinar for quite a while now. And I guess with all the changes that are happening through the world, we’ve just stuck with this for the moment but we are definitely considering our options as to how this all works. There are quite a few different moving pieces in terms of this piece of software and how it works and then what we want to achieve with these ongoing webinars. It is definitely on the agenda. And thanks for your question there, Chris.
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| All right. Okay. Look, it’s obvious that … Well, you can see behind myself and Jas, we are working from home and the remote working model has been adopted by so many companies at the moment. And with that, the usage rights of Microsoft Teams is absolutely skyrocketing, so Jas, how do you describe Teams to companies who are yet to adopt the solution?
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| Jas: | Yeah. It’s really the hub for teamwork within Microsoft 365 and what that means, it brings together all of the elements of your productivity suite into one hub so that you can really get all of your teamwork done effectively across your entire organization. Whether that’s with your knowledge workers in your office and your traditional headquarters or anyone that’s working on the frontline as well. Bringing that together through chat, through calling and meetings, through collaborative virtual workspaces. And then of course, the integration of works and application integration that organizations are already using to get a lot of the other things they need to do within the organization completed.
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| Chris: | And obviously, there’s been a massive increase in users. What are the latest stats you’ve got around the number of users for Teams?
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| Jas: | Yeah, I think the latest was around 44 million, which is massive. I don’t have the numbers for us really specifically but we’ve actually released a blog recently that calls out some of the interesting insights that we’re seeing as part of that. Obviously, there’s a lot of people that have been using Teams maybe for things like chat or file sharing but through the time we’ve actually seen people doing twice as many meetings as Microsoft Teams meetings and turning on a lot more video calling. I think a lot of people will remember back to the days of Skype and even when I started working in Microsoft, video wasn’t really a thing. It was a feature but no one really turned it on. And I think generally, we saw a massive increase with that in Teams but it’s just completely blown up since then. I think we’ve actually saw that 57% of Australians using Microsoft Teams turn on video. One of the top countries in the world. Yeah.
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| Chris: | I’ve been using video a lot as well but as my beard is getting longer and my hair is getting longer, I’m thinking I might to have to maybe put up a photo of me and just use that instead of the live video because it’s just getting worse and worse. My wife has told me that I’m turning into Seth Rogan. She said this looks like … Look, with an explosion of users, it would have been great to spread them out across a full year perhaps but it really has been absolutely full on the last six weeks or so. What are some of the new features of Teams that have attracted all those users over?
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| Jas: | Yeah. I think I’ve got a couple coming up in our future of Teams section as well but there are quite a few things that a lot of Teams users have been asking for, for a while. I think one of the ones that I’m missing right now is custom background.
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| Chris: | Yes.
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| Jas: | I think [inaudible] decide where you’re working from. We’ve actually rolled out background effects, which means that you should be able to select different background effects within your Teams background blur option today but with custom backgrounds, we’ll actually be able to upload the images of where you want to work from. I’m working from Canada right now with my family and I had a lovely image of the Lake in my background, which is really nice to have and just lighten up the situation and everything that’s happening.
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| A couple of others that I think are really going to help with the very meeting … Heavy virtual meeting, heavy situation that we’re in, our raise hands, which is actually a feature that allows you to indicate that you’ve got something to contribute to a conversation. I think based on all of our different styles, we all tend to integrate and try to give input in meetings very differently. And I think it’s harder for some people to speak up or not want to speak over people. And so this feature is really designed to help people with that. The other one is end meeting. I think it’s great to have the ability to record meetings but if someone forgets to hang up, then you’ve got a very long recording of one person that’s just forgot to hang up the call. End meeting will actually let you end that meeting and then not have to worry about that.
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| Chris: | Nice. Nice. Oh, I’ve got a bit behind on my slides there. Apologies for that. All right. Obviously, setting Microsoft Teams up, it’s a big thing. And you’ve got some thoughts around some of the must do activities that we need to consider to get the most out of Teams as we look to find Microsoft Teams Nirvana. We’ll work through the points on the screen here and I’ll play a little bit of devil’s advocate here if you like. And you can set me straight on whether I’m right or wrong. I want to know initially, why is planning so important? Isn’t Teams just like an out of the box solution that is going to solve every single one of my communications issues?
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| Jas: | No, Chris. Just like the adoption of any other technology, there’s a lot of planning that needs to happen to ensure that your users are actually going to adopt the application in a way that’s transforming the way that they’re working today.
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| And so when we think about planning, a couple of things that come to mind … One is just a very strong partnership between [inaudible] your organization and the business. Really making sure that you’re understanding what the pain points are of the business and how you can help to solve that. With some of our customers where that hasn’t necessarily happened as well, we see things like shadow IT popping up because the business has found solutions for the pains that they’re feeling that they maybe aren’t aware of, that they can actually leverage today.
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| And then another really big one is use cases. Several people have worked in environments where you’ve maybe got three or four different tools that do different elements of collaboration but different pieces of it. And so those environments can be really messy. It’s important for your users to understand not only how they’re going to use the tools but in which scenarios would they use a tool? When would they set up a chat versus a Team? When would they send an email versus setting up a Team but also … Yeah, also understanding what they’re actually needing to do with … Oh, my God. I completely [inaudible 00:10:30]. What they are going from, so say they are using Skype and a couple of other applications before, which things are going away to help to continue the simplification of that productivity environment and not just add another tool that people don’t really understand or see the value in right away.
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| Chris: | Okay. You have sent me straight. Thank you very much for that. And what about this whole thing … I keep hearing this thing about this need for governance? Doesn’t Office 365 just keep everything in line for me?
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| Jas: | Governance is one of the hottest topics I think, in Teams. And I think …
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| Chris: | Absolutely.
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| Jas: | Yeah, there’s not a right or wrong way to do it. It really varies for every organization but I think having your governance plan built into your entire adoption plan is really important from the beginning. And a lot of organizations for a really good reason, have the need to actually have a lot more governance in place. They may need to have a process where there’s actually only certain people that can create Teams and they’re worried about having too many Teams created at one time.
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| At Microsoft, we actually have a fairly open policy and we’re slowly now getting into the notion of moving away from saying, “Oh, create a Team site and we can collaborate on the Team site.”
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| To try to say, “Hey, there’s actually a Team site for that. This would be perfect as a channel with an existing team that we have.”
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| I think the key thing with governance, is that we’re here to help and lots of our partners actually offer really great solutions and support in this area too, just to make sure that your organization’s getting what you need and you’re comfortable with the setup for you guys.
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| Chris: | Yeah, it’s amazing. You get so excited about how many Teams and channels you can make, you don’t really think that you could be making a little bit of a mess by this proliferation of these [inaudible] chat and you just tend to forget, “Well, which one was that in?”
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| I think that’s a really great point and we’ve certainly started to realize that within LiveTiles and with our customers as well, that we need to give them a bit of a hand to help guide them within the terms of the governance section. Yeah, absolutely. This next one I find interesting, we hear a lot of people saying … We talk about collaboration and they say, “Oh, we put Teams in. We’re collaborating it. People will work it out for themselves.”
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| But it doesn’t just work as easily as that does it?
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| Jas: | No, not exactly, oddly. I think we’re all increasingly living in a world where our roles are way more reliant on other roles than our organizations to actually achieve not only what we need but what our organization’s actually trying to achieve. And a lot of the pitfalls that organizations are seeing with projects and programs is that there’s been a breakdown of that collaboration within the team.
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| Implementing Teams isn’t going to solve that issue for you right away but building up the use cases and helping your users understand how they can use a platform to collaborate and really understanding their business needs. Is it just going to be for an internal audience? Do they actually collaborate with a lot of people externally? And do you need to put certain policies in place to continue to allow them to do that? Taking all that into consideration and again, really building a collaborative approach across the organization when you’re drawing up this adoption plan, so that that collaboration’s happening right from the beginning. And I think one of the key things among that plan is really ensuring that you’ve got executive sponsorship and leadership behind you in this effort. How does it fold into what your organization is trying to do more broadly so that you’ve got as much support as you need to drive it across the organization?
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| Chris: | And then obviously, Microsoft Teams are just going to solve all of our engagement issues as well, isn’t it? It’s just doing everything.
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| Jas: | Oh, there’s so many elements and layers to employee engagement but I’ve been working predominantly remotely for the last year and a half. Most of my team is actually based in Sydney and I’m based in a different city and so it’s even just little things sometimes. I think the biggest one for me, is just the flexibility and mobility with Teams.
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| You’re going to get the same experience on any application using Microsoft Teams, which means if I want to take a walk while I’m doing a call, I can do that. I can do that from my phone. I don’t have to be stuck to my desk. If I need to take an urgent call but I also need to go to the airport, I can do that on my way to the airport. That flexibility really enables people to work from anywhere, the way they want to work.
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| And it’s also the ability to share your expression. You want to be able to get people to understand your personality when you’re asking for things. I think being Canadian, I’m probably always over appreciative and overly thankful but you want people to get an idea of how you are and what emotions you’re sharing behind some of the stuff that you’re experiencing and going through that. Things like turning on your video have a really major impact on employee engagement and then using things like praise to give recognition to your employees within the different Teams that you’ve got set up.
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| And then I think the last one, which has really been a very big ask from a lot of our customers in terms of support, is live events. How do you keep your employees engaged and connected in a situation like this where you need to do everything virtually? And you can actually use Teams live events to help you do that as well.
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| Chris: | It took me a long time to get used to using the GIFs in the office but a lot of the younger people, I can see them within a Teams chat, they would have a whole conversation with GIFs. They didn’t even type one word, it was amazing but I also have been really getting used to lately, with this whole idea of having a meeting from anywhere. Usually every single morning, except for on Thursdays when I do these, I get out of the house at 8:00 AM and between 8:00AM and 9:00AM, I go for a walk but from 8:30AM til 9:00AM, I have my daily whip with my team and I could be anywhere. It’s absolutely fantastic.
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| Jas: | Yeah, it’s really …
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| Chris: | I was going to say, other than the fact that I start to maybe pant a little bit because I’m walking too fast and I’m not that fit, they don’t know where I am.
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| Jas: | Yeah. No, it’s really true. It’s funny, my parents are still getting used to the fact that I’m a mobile worker. Whenever we’re doing things, sometimes I’ll be on my device or I’ll be on my computer and they’re like, “Oh, so when are you going to start work?”
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| And I was like, “I’ve been working.”
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| Chris: | They don’t get it.
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| Jas: | It’s really good. Yeah.
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| Chris: | The last thing, which is really important, it’s just thinking about integration. Some people say, “Well if I’m implementing Teams, I can just do away with my email, my intranet, my knowledge base, my external systems.”
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| But it’s not really about doing away with them. It’s like finding ways for them to work together, isn’t it?
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| Jas: | Yeah, exactly. I think as Teams has grown in the last three years, there’s been a lot of debates over, “Is Outlook going away? Is Yammer going away? Are we not going to have email anymore?”
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| And I think it’s exactly like you said, it’s just finding the place for those applications and solutions, compared to when you’re going to use Teams for collaboration. I think the other key thing with integration in Teams, is that we really want to bring together your entire workflow. What are the other processes that you’re managing outside of Teams and how can you integrate those into the system itself? How do you prevent yourself from getting distracted when you’re looking for a file or looking for a piece of information? Building a virtual space for yourself, where you can actually house all that information in one place, will really help your users be more productive.
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| Chris: | Yeah. Some of the people on the chat will be LiveTile’s customers that have got the other Wisdom Intelligent Internet Solution and might be familiar with the power panel that sits within Teams, purely for that reason these days, so we can have everything coming into one area. I liken it … For people of my age, we talk about Voltron from the 80s, being a robot that was combined by five or six different robots to create a massively great thing but with today’s today’s people, maybe I need to talk about the Avengers, that you’ve got this team coming together with all these different parts, just to create this great super experience. That’s how I see Teams and certainly that’s the way LiveTiles is interacting with it now as well.
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| Jas: | Yeah. Amazing.
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| Chris: | All right. I’ve lost you with the Voltron reference, I know, that’s okay.
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| Jas: | No, I’m sorry. I didn’t have TV for a couple of years as a child. Does that buy me any kind of a pass?
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| Chris: | There will be some 40-year-olds in the audience today that’ll be nodding their heads, knowing what Voltron is, that’s okay.
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| Jas: | We should have [crosstalk] a reference.
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| Chris: | Let’s move on to the important stuff. This is what I’ve been looking forward to, which is the customer stories. I know from our experiences with our customers at LiveTiles that are implementing Microsoft Teams, it’s not a one size fits all proposition. And we’ve just talked through some of the reasons why that’s true. Tell us about some of these customers, what they’ve been doing from your experience.
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| Jas: | Yeah, absolutely. We’ve had a very strong base of customers that are very knowledge worker centric with Teams. A lot of the traditional parts of an organization, marketing, comms, project Teams within organizations and I think shifting to remote working, for a lot of them, was actually just enabling to do that maybe from a technical perspective within their organizations and starting to change that culture in a situation that they really had to make that change. And that’s amazing because it means that a lot of these organizations that were actually planning to do that and planning this as part of their digital transformation, have actually been able to go ahead and do that quite quickly. I think the biggest learning from our customers this past few weeks and the biggest call for help was, “Hey, we want to do this really quickly. Initially, we were thinking we’re going to do it in three or four months, now we want to do it in three or four days.”
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| But the key thing is that they still want to make sure that security, governance, compliance, all of these things, are still taken into consideration when they’re setting this up so they don’t run into challenges as they’re going through this situation, which we obviously don’t really know how long is going to last or really what the world will look like once this is over.
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| I thought I’d love to just touch on two customer stories that actually focus more on frontline in two of the industries that Teams is actually helping to support in Australia. I can’t mention the customer names but I’ll just talk a little bit through each of these examples.
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| The first one is actually in public safety. And so this organization was very challenged with a lack of corporate mobility, very stuck in traditional working in an office, core fields collaboration and just not having a standard of communication across their entire organization. This actually led to a large lack of coordination. They didn’t have much situational awareness and once the situation started to ramp up, it actually introduced a lot of challenges, especially in terms of incident response.
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| They actually moved ahead their Teams appointment. And so we actually want to do this within two weeks but we need to make sure that … Yeah, of course. We need to make sure that we do it compliantly and securely. And so they actually took everything they needed to do from the planning perspective, spent two days mapping out everything they needed to do in terms of their use cases, ensuring they had the right governance in place and actually went ahead and developed the scenarios to address the requirements that they needed, in partnership with Microsoft to make sure that they actually were able to do this across not just the corporate devices that they had but also the mobile devices that their users wanted to use as well, to have that mobile experience.
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| They were actually able to enable just over 10,000 corporate and mobile devices within that time, including the deployment of security to ensure that everything they had was safe within the platform. And now, they’re actually able to move ahead in a much more connected way, in responding to the current situation and really taking a project that they thought would take three months and breaking it into two weeks, to make sure they had that impact as soon as they needed it. Yeah, really amazing.
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| Chris: | That’s unreal.
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| Jas: | Yeah. The next one’s actually in healthcare. Compliance and governance were two very big considerations for this customer. Again, they had been thinking about Teams for a while but just still working through the planning and the use cases. Once the situation started to take place, they really needed to deploy Teams very quickly to support communication and collaboration. Again, of around 9,000 personnel within their entire organization, while ensuring that there wasn’t any form of compromise to patient care, which is the key element of everything that they do.
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| They were actually able to very quickly deploy the solution. They worked with a partner to ensure they have the right level of governance in place and now, regardless of where the different doctors and nurses and medical staff are in the hospital, they’re actually able to have virtual consulting rooms. They’ve had a massive spike in usage just in the few first few weeks. The executives are also running meetings through Teams and just within a week after everything was deployed, their doctors actually felt comfortable doing virtual ward rounds, as an example, within Teams. And so in this situation, it also enables them to really take into consideration the safety of all the people that are working in this situation. As an example, having some people that are in a quarantined area versus those aren’t and being able to virtually consult each other without needing to compromise that safety.
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| Chris: | Oh, it’s fantastic. Absolutely.
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| Jas: | Yeah.
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| Chris: | I’ve got a very quick one. A large government department that we were working with … Obviously COVID changed the game for them, where they need to really quickly deploy a work from home solution but they had nothing set up. The issues they had … They had file shares that had poor performance over the internet. They needed to have a VPN to access them all the time. They had an antiquated video conferencing setup that that only worked for internal people with a specific app. And then it didn’t work across the VPN. Then obviously, anybody who’s going to be working remotely would have been isolated. There was no cross government agency sharing or collaboration set up.
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| And they wanted to do Teams but they were really dragging their heels. There was some really … A lot of internal IT resistance. They didn’t see the need for remote solutions because somebody would say, “Oh, everyone’s always in the office, we don’t need it.”
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| And they actually saw digital transformation as just being an easier way to send email. You have so many issues to work through but when COVID hit, they were like, “Oh, we’ve just got to go.”
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| Then what they did … They press the go button and then all of a sudden … That was four weeks ago. They now have over a thousand Teams and 14,000 users, so adoption rates have gone through the roof and let’s also start to open up other opportunities for them with their whole Office 365 subscription, which they already had but they just weren’t utilizing. Not only did Teams come in and change the way that they are communicating, it changed a lot of other things in the flow on with some of the other Microsoft products that they’ve plugged in and turned on now. Yeah, it’s happening all over the place.
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| Jas: | Yeah, it’s amazing. And I think you make a lot of good points. I think some customers aren’t as mindful of some of the things that need to be in place before they can actually enable remote working within their environment. And so I know a lot of our partners have been working really closely to ensure that while they’re doing that, they’re really creating the best end user experience. That’s awesome. It’s a really great story.
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| Chris: | Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, we’ve talked about how it’s changing companies right now. Let’s have a little bit of a sneak peek into the future. It is being used by a lot of people for a lot of different functions but yeah, let’s get people excited. What’s going on down the pipeline for Teams, Jas?
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| Jas: | Yeah. Look, I think a lot of our development in terms of things that are landing in the next little while, is very centered on continuing to build up the meetings experience and so we’ve touched on a couple of things earlier but another big feature that a lot of people have been asking for, is the ability to see more people within a video call. Now, you’ve got your traditional four … Your traditional four people. We’re actually going to have three by three video, which means you’ll be able to have nine windows. I know some people still want more, we’re working on it but I think it’s a great direction for us in terms of shifting from four to nine. That’ll be coming later this year.
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| Another ask that we get a lot from the customers in the education space, is really around being able to understand the participants that may have been part of the meeting. Teachers as an example, want to understand which participants came in, how long were they there for, when did they leave, even connected to learning in a lot of organizations, it’s skilling. That’s something that’s coming later this year as well.
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| Chris: | That’s good.
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| Jas: | The last one that you may have seen a video on earlier this year, is realtime noise suppression. We know that people like to join Teams calls and maybe forget to join on mute. When there’s a lot of people that have joined, who don’t realize they’re on mute, you get to hear some of the fun stuff that’s happening in the background of their environments. I’m pretty sure a few weeks ago I actually heard a hockey game happening in the background, which must been a replay because hockey is definitely not on right now but we’ve actually got real time noise suppression, which is actually using AI to reduce the distracting background noise, which is contributing to some of that noise in meetings. There’s a really great video which actually shows someone eating a bag of chips not on mute and you can actually not hear any of that sound, so snack away and the AI will take care of it.
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| Chris: | Oh, that’s great. I was just about to get some chips right now, weren’t we? Quickly Jas, there’s just a couple of questions from William and Scott, just asking about what was the delivery date for the [inaudible 00:27:51], approximately?
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| Jas: | Yes. I think I’ll have to come back and maybe I can give you the exact date that we can share. I don’t know if we’ve got an exact date or if Luke it’s coming within the next few months. I’ll just have to double check.
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| Chris: | Okay. Yep, sure. No worries. We’ll follow up on that. Great stuff. Thanks for the questions peeps. No worries. Anything else or is that wrapping it up there?
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| Jas: | Yeah. Look, I think just generally, the future of Teams, thinking about your chat and collaboration that your users are already using and starting to use, hopefully today. The meetings experience, really leveraging live meetings. I think the next really key piece, for me and a lot of organizations are already starting to work on this now, is really thinking about how you integrate your existing workflows. What other things are really crucial to your environment that need to happen? Maybe it’s an inventory process or a tracking process that actually gets managed into the current system. How can you use custom applications or things like our apps, to actually help to integrate that within Teams? And so we were running a lot of workshops to help get customers starting to think about that. Another really important one, to make sure that it and the business are partnering very closely on, so the business can actually bring to light which challenges they’ve got within those environments but definitely something that we’re hoping to just continue to talk to our customers about to really keep building that simple and integrated productivity environment.
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| Chris: | Yeah, great. And look, there are a few other questions here around the video support. It seems like it’s very a hot topic at the moment but what we might do in the email or follow up from this session, we might get Jas to give us a few links to different things … Yeah, that we can get people to have a good look at. That’s great.
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| I’m just thinking in the interest of time, we probably need to keep this thing moving. I apologize for running over time on this. Maybe I need to bump these up to 45 minute sessions. I thought we’d get through in half an hour but that’s okay. Let me just take a very quick minute to tell you how LiveTiles can assist you with your adoption of Microsoft Teams.
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| You can see there, that’s Jas’s must do, is back up on the screen there, just to frame this all up. Our website, you can see that it’s our Microsoft team support services that we offer to help with all of these must dos that Jas has mentioned earlier.
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| First up, funny story. Before Corona hit us, we created this fantastic card game to assist with implementing Microsoft Teams. Literally, we were playing with some customers about two weeks prior to the Corona thing happening and then all of a sudden, social isolation hit us. We had to really pivot in terms of helping our customers plan out their Teams implementation. We can’t play it in person for now but we’ve applied the same insights and thinking to an online version of the game. It’s really useful. I’ve been involved with a few of these sessions with customers and it’s amazing how effective it is at drawing out the things you need to think about in terms of implementing Teams successfully. We now run those sessions virtually if you like, or a using our LiveTiles pages on a software to help assist with that. That’s a really important step. It gets you to think about lots of different things and on the website there, you can see some videos and some tips and tricks and some steps of how that can help.
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| Following on from that, we’ve also got a really effective Teams planner. It’s really simple. It’s basically an Excel spreadsheet that’s being built up to help you think about going a little bit deeper into planning out your Teams and gives you an overview of what you are actually creating, the types of Teams and the access and all that sort of thing before you actually jump in. And it can really help you with the governance decisions that we talked about a little bit earlier. That leads into a whole whole lot of other issues, a lot deeper discussion than we really have time for today but for sure governance is a massive issue that we need to consider and it’s probably not something you immediately think about when you’re all wrapped up in the excitement of, “Hey, we’ve got Teams.”
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| That sort of thing. In terms of collaboration and engagement, we’ve got a bunch of videos starring our Teams expert and customer success champion, Molly. I’ve been working with her for the last couple of weeks on those and we’ve created about 20 odd short and sharp videos with really simple and effective tips and tricks and she’s absolutely wonderful. You’ll love Molly. She’s such a lovely girl. She’s fantastic, very smart. And the tips that she’s been sharing are just absolutely awesome. They go for about 45 seconds or 60 seconds and she’s straight to the point. And at the end of that, there’s a bag of 20 odd tricks there that you can learn very quickly. It’s really great.
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| And then the last element on integration is probably for those who are using Teams extensively and perhaps thinking how you might want to incorporate your Intranet functions such as your people directory management, your corporate comms, your notice board, procedures, bot, [inaudible 00:00:32:29], all those things, which in the past have sprung out of the intranet. Well, we have this little thing called a power panel, which I mentioned before. It comes part of the Wizdom Intelligent Intranet and it sits nicely in Teams and it handles all of that amalgamation, so really, what we’ve been working on with Teams is augmenting an already awesome product with some of the bits and pieces of tech that LiveTiles are great at delivering.
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| It makes Teams a bit of a one stop destination for lots of different functions and I’ve even noticed this week, I’ve installed Yammer as an app into my Teams as well to add that element into it as well. It’s all happening in the Teams space. Look, if you want to know anything more about Teams adoption and that sort of thing, you can jump onto the solutions tab on livetilesglobal.com. Or you can email me and I can point you in the right direction. That’s my email address there on the screen there, if you want to jot that one down. How did I go there, Jas? Have I missed anything?
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| Jas: | No, that was great. Thank you.
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| Chris: | Thanks for that. All right. Well, we probably don’t really have time for questions today, so once again, there’s my email address there on the screen if you want to get in contact with me and I can point you in the right direction with whatever you need. I will follow up this session with an email, which as I said before, Jas will give us a few key links that we can go and find a little bit more information about post this session. Wonderful stuff.
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| Next week, got a little bit of a different pivot for you, going to have a bit of a chat about wellness … Sorry, well-being and mindfulness with somebody who I spoke to previously on the Intelligent Workplace Podcast, Nina Purewal. She is the co-author of that book there, called Let That Shit Go. And she’s also the co-founder of Pure Minds. Fantastic backstory, so maybe before you jump on next week’s session, jump onto the Intelligent Workplace Podcast and have a listen to her backstory. The conversation that I had with her just really totally caught me off guard. It was really open and raw and fantastic talking about her journey into mindfulness.
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| I’m going to team her up next week with the co-founder of LiveTiles, Peter Nguyen- Brown, who is also really, really interested in the whole wellness movement. He’s the man behind LiveSmiles and we’ve got a bit of a new addition to that that we’re giving away. Nice change of pace but another piece of important information in there from the current situation that we find ourselves in. Jas, thank you so much for joining me today from Canada. It’s been fantastic having you on here. You shared some great insights, some great features of Teams and some great customer stories, so thank you very much for your time.
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| Jas: | Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
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| Chris: | Absolute pleasure. And everybody else, look out next week for the next session but thank you for taking the time to join us today. I apologize for running a little bit over time but I thought it was a really great session, so thanks. And we’ll talk to you again. Cheers.
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| Jas: | Thank you. Bye. |
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