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Today Microsoft announced Viva, an Employee Experience Platform integrated right into Microsoft Teams.

Initially, Viva will contain four separate modules.

Viva Connections - Culture and Communication - Utilising SharePoint and Yammer

Viva Insights - Productivity and Well-Being - Utilising Insights

Viva Learning - Utilising content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, Your own content and content from leading providers

Viva Topics - Knowledge and Expertise utilising AI to and in-house experts to tag content with Topics to create your organisations own Wikipedia to be sure people can find the right information at the right time. Previously Project Cortex

For more information check out this the Microsoft VIva page here

Employee Experience & Engagement | Microsoft Viva

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Yesterday saw the launch of the new Poly Studio P series, a portfolio of video and audio devices aimed at giving individuals a professional set of tools to work successful irrespective to where they are working.

Included in the line-up was

• Poly Studio P5 - A 1080P Webcam

• Poly Studio P15 - A 4K webcam with combined speaker and microphone array

• Poly Studio P21 - A 21” USB monitor with integrated, speakers, microphone, vanity light and phone charger

Also announced was the new Poly Lens desktop application that gives users the ability to control their device including the settings whilst IT can leverage Poly Cloud

Below you will see a short video covering my initial thoughts

You can watch the full announcement that was live broadcast on Neil Fluester’s channel below.

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I am talking to a large amount of people about the calling functionality within Teams at present so I’m my usual fashion I thought I would draw a doodle to help me illustrate the architecture.

The diagram above illustrates the different components within the architecture of a simple direct routing implementation of Microsoft Teams Calling including some of the licensing considerations over and above the 365 licence you are likely to already have.

This is just one of the configuration options available for Teams and if you are looking for a more simplistic solution using Teams native calling plans maybe a better option for you.

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Megan Warren and I recently presented at Commsverse Online 2020, covering productivity and well-being in conjunction with Microsoft 365. The doodle above depicts some of the take-aways from the presentation.

Please find links below to a few resources mentioned

Microsoft MyAnalytics

Swipe Gestures in Outlook IOS

Forest

How to be a Productivity Ninja Book

The CORD productivity monitor

Teams integrated status lights

Over the last few days, I have been attending and presenting at Commsverse the Microsoft Teams conference. The conference was originally going to be an in-person conference at Mercedes Benz world but due to the current lockdown status, the team behind Commsverse have moved the in-person conference to next year and pulled together a virtual conference.

My first presentation concentrated on increasing productivity whilst at work and disconnecting from work within your personal time to help protect your well-being. I was joined on this presentation by Megan Warren and we spoke about, Microsoft Teams, My Analytics, productivity methodologies and much more. I will follow up with a doodle covering the content shortly.

My second session focused on driving adoption of Teams and Microsoft 365, with my colleague Anthony Charman. We presented about the importance of treating a Microsoft Teams project as not only a technology project but also a business change project, engage the business leaders and users to make Teams relevant to the users and raise levels of adoption. Again I will share some information separately on this.

I was really impressed by the variety of sessions and the quality of presenters during the conference. With experts covering a wide range of subjects such as calling, meetings, collaboration, devices and much more.

I was really impressed by the amount of effort that the team behind Commsverse put into making the conference possible and the fact the conference was all hosted on Microsoft technologies. The main body of the conference was ran through Microsoft Teams with Teams setup as vendor booths and places to chat for attendees, the sessions were delivered using Microsoft Teams Live Events. Whilst there were challenges behind using this as a platform for a 2000+ attendee global event I think the team behind Commsverse did an amazing event to make this possible.

One of the interesting use cases was the use of AltSpaceVR for a show floor area, whilst it wasn’t widely used during the times I visited I found it a really good interactive platform to walk around and speak to vendors.

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