Microsoft Teams Versus Skype for Business

There’s some confusion for some as to what the differences are between the two products. After all, there is a lot of overlap in the two platforms when it comes to functionality—both allow for chat, calls and conferencing among individuals and teams. The deeper difference lies in the focus of Teams on all-round collaboration. Sure, you can use Skype for Business to host meetings and share files, but if you want full integration with the rest of your enterprise Office 365 programs, Teams is the way to go.

The clearest difference between the two however is that Skype for Business is coming to the end of its life. Support from Microsoft for Skype for Business Online is end in July 2021, with Skype for Business Server 2019 (the version the majority of medium to large enterprises use) receiving support through October 14, 2025, but with limited updates in comparison to Microsoft Teams.

Understanding the Core of Microsoft Teams

There are two very important core capabilities when it comes to Microsoft Teams. The first of these is the communications platform. This is the capability people who have used Skype for Business are familiar with, with it functioning in essentially the same way. People can send chat messages and initiate voice and video calls or conferences with colleagues and external users also using the software. Much like Skype, you can add emojis, images, videos, and even customised memes to your chat if you wish.

The second capability is the hub. This is a shared collaborative space that integrates all of Microsoft’s other Office 365 programs directly into Teams. This hub allows you and your employees to use everything from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, SharePoint, Power BI and more, natively within Microsoft Teams. This does away with the hassle of having to switch from one application as you get your work done.

Microsoft Teams for the Modern Workplace

Microsoft Teams is highly adaptive in a world where the workforce is increasingly diverse and organizational structures flatter than ever before. It caters to the need for quick flowing communication and integrated workspaces. At the heart of Microsoft Teams are three S’s: security, sharing and segmentation. ‘Security’ refers to the fact that Teams complies with the strictest security and associated governance protocols. ‘Sharing’ refers to the easy way in which content can be found and shared with others. ‘Segmentation’ refers to the native organization of groups and colleagues within the software.

Versatility is a watchword when it comes to Microsoft Teams with conversations threaded and readily updated in real-time to match the flow of conversation within your company. Each of these conversations is also tagged for the key components to allow users to easily go back and draw out information that they need. For those who value security in higher-level discussions, there are of course options to ensure privacy for only those selected to be part of specific conversations.

Time Matters in Microsoft Teams

One key differentiator between Microsoft Teams and the similar Skype for Business, is the inclusion of much improved time management capabilities. First of these is the built-in calendar function. This allows you to schedule meetings with all the fine details built-in. For example, apart from selecting the time and date of the meeting, you can set the channel within which it will take place. The automatically sends invites from within Teams without having to go to Outlook.

If you’re one whose work calendar tends to fill up, Microsoft Teams has a Scheduling Assistant – similar to the one available in Outlook – that can find the best times available for everyone involved. This saves you time you would normally spend manually trawling through your own calendar and having to reach out to ask how everyone else’s calendars are looking like. The application itself sends out notifications prior to the start of the meeting depending on the time threshold you set yourself.

A second key function useful to companies with shift workers is the ability to create, communicate, and manage work shifts for employees. Everything is intuitive in this regard. Managers are able to create work schedules for their teams which are then added onto a calendar for easy reference. These schedules can be customized to reflect different time zones for remote teams should you have them. These set schedules and any further changes can readily be shared to the entire team or specifically impacted employees.

For the employee, they have control over when they clock in and clock out. More than that, the Shifts functionality allows them to easily submit leave requests which can be reviewed by managers who can then approve or deny as necessary. If allowed, employees can even submit shift swaps with their colleagues. It’s a feature that truly empowers a remote workforce looking to stay organized in spite of the distances involved—one that certainly contributes to a strong schedule and – ultimately – improved productivity.

Bringing Automation Into the Workplace

Automation is becoming very popular in terms of workflow processes because of the efficiency it brings to repetitive tasks. There are two ways in which automation is applied to Microsoft Teams. First is the easy way in which you can integrate bots into your set up. There are a lot of options available here covering a wide range of needs. The most commonly used are calendar bots that make scheduling even simpler, and secretary bots who help collect key information for you, take messages when you are away, and more.

One of the most effective of these bots from a communication standpoint are survey bots that can assist in gathering much-needed feedback on anything and everything with less input required from your end. Not only can these bots be trained to proactively share important surveys, but they also collect responses, send reminders to those who haven’t responded, and organise data as well. They’re great examples of accessible artificial intelligence and automation that fit seamlessly into a platform like Teams.

The second application is through Microsoft Flow. Workflow process automation is something that has long been popular for people in the smart home. Known as IFTTT (short for If This Then That) These are sets of executable commands working off different applications and programs designed to trigger when a specific action is taken which then flows to a desired automated output. This does away with repetitive tasks—freeing you up for the work that matters and requires your utmost attention.

For example, you can create a flow that takes attachments sent from a particular channel in Microsoft Teams and automatically places it in a curated folder in your company’s SharePoint. That same flow can then send a notification to your Outlook that it’s done—and later send follow-ups should you ignore the notifications. The configurations are limited only by the imagination and—like the bots—creating them up can be done entirely within Microsoft Teams.

A Complete Collaborative Work Hub

The true power of Microsoft Teams comes when you have a full enterprise Office 365 subscription because then you really get benefit from its full collaborative potential. Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that form the foundation of many people’s daily work can be accessed, shared, and natively edited in real-time via Microsoft Teams. All of these can then be organised—still via Teams—into SharePoint or OneDrive for easier aggregation. The built-in search function within Teams makes retrieval at a later date easy.

It isn’t just these programs that are fully integrated either, you can enjoy the full functionality of Microsoft’s other enterprise Office 365 programs right from within Microsoft Teams. You can use Power BI, for instance, to better collate and present key company data in a meaningful and easy to digest format. You can also use Planner to better visualize your work allocation and schedules within your company to make it easier to coordinate specific plans and projects—again without needing to leave Microsoft Teams.

Even if a lot of your workplace ecosystem is outside of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of products, you can utilize Connectors to incorporate popular third-party applications into Microsoft Teams. You can integrate Twitter and get updates to your company Twitter page in a channel in Teams. You can connect Github to allow your developers to track their projects. There are even many CRM-integration options so your marketing and sales teams can keep tabs on that while communicating with Microsoft Teams.

Even more potent than Connectors are Tabs. Where the former allows snapshots of activity, Tabs give you a full dashboard view of specified third-party services in a separate window within Microsoft Teams. While the process to create a tab is a little more difficult than using connectors, it’s worthwhile if the function is critical to business processes. For example sales teams can track key outstanding tickets for review within Teams if set up in that way.

Safety is a Priority in Microsoft Teams

With all the sensitive and proprietary information passing through Microsoft Teams, it’s great to know that security is a standout feature of the platform. Data is always encrypted whether it’s being passed back and forth or is just sitting in a channel. That’s because the platform meets crucial compliance standards like ISO 27001. There’s also Advance Threat Protection (ATP) that analyses content for potential malware to keep your company safe.

All in all, Microsoft Teams is one of the most convenient and feature-rich enterprise communication and collaboration tools out there. It might come with a somewhat steep learning curve given the complexity of its system, but it’s worth it considering what you can ultimately get out of the platform. It’s the perfect central hub for businesses that are already deeply embedded in the whole Office 365 ecosystem as its integrations and co-operability are unmatched in utility and functionality.

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For enterprise users of the Office stack, it’s the innovative new features that Microsoft are rolling out that will make a noticeable difference for end users within organisations.

What’s in a name?

The move towards ‘Microsoft 365’ is partly a move towards what is essentially a cloud-based subscription model. Though the ‘perpetual license’ versions of a majority of Office suite products like Home and Student 2019 will continue to be sold, subscription seems to be the destination Microsoft is trying to reach. Fortunately for end users, this brings with it a slew of features and upgrades with little change to the actual pricing as it stands.

These include the requisite Office apps. So, expect to still be able to enjoy Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Note, and Outlook—which are the most used. You also enjoy Microsoft’s intranet and collaborative platform SharePoint, enterprise social network Yammer, and the increasingly popular communication suite Teams. The announcement from Redwood also highlighted the 1TB of OneDrive storage included as standard, strong security features, continuous tech support and an hour’s worth of Skype calling time.

Microsoft 365 for everybody

While much of this recent announcement is focussing on non-enterprise offerings, the new features will overlap into versions of Microsoft products being used by large enterprise. Microsoft 365 is paving the way for a revitalisation across the board. Emerging technologies like AI and even online monetary transactions are taking centre stage and incorporated in the applications where these technologies are most beneficial. Here are the biggest improvements that you can expect.

Microsoft Word editor improvements

Proofing within Microsoft Word has always been somewhat hit and miss. Without customisations to its dictionary, it’s very easy for the program to overlook simple errors in spelling and grammar. Microsoft 365 seeks to keep people from having to rely on external, third-party software like Grammarly for their document editing needs. To this end, they’ve added far more advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.

Apart from advanced editing features that emphasise better grammar as well as style. It will also include rewrite suggestions to improve the final output as well as anti-plagiarism measures—including a quick-click citation addition tool. Like a lot of AI additions to Microsoft 365, much of this will stem from Azure AI services. While Word is the initial focus of this move, the same features will be rolled out to Outlook and even Microsoft’s proprietary Edge browser (via an extension) as well as other browsers like Google Chrome.

Microsoft PowerPoint Presenter Coach

If you’ve ever found your presentations either too long or too short, Microsoft 365 has you covered. It is rolling out an updated version of Presenter Coach for PowerPoint. The name says is all. Utilising advanced AI analytics, the latest version will actually monitor your speech, tone, and the words you choose as you dry run your presentation. It then gives a post-presentation report that tells you exactly how you have performed.

What’s great about this report is that it’s very comprehensive. You not only get the total time you have covered as well as a slide count, it provides powerful suggestions regarding your pace and cadence. More importantly, it also aids in improving the quality of your overall presentation by noting if you’re simply reading off slides without adding anything substantial. It also tags filler words you might be regularly using without realising or any convoluted phrases that might have slipped in. 

Better connectivity and communications in Microsoft 365

The feature updates for Microsoft 365 when it comes to Teams are subtle but just as relevant—particularly when it comes to collaboration. That’s seen in shared to-do lists within a team, the ability to organise shared calendars that sync in real-time, and even share team passwords. These are timely updates given that the recent and ongoing COVID-19 crisis has driven more companies moving towards a remote work model.

Mobile improvements in Microsoft 365

Whereas Microsoft’s Office suite used to exist as separate applications on mobile platforms. While those separate iterations still exist and function well, for Microsoft 365 they’ve created a single application that brings the functionality of all three together. This lets you interact with different file types without needing to open up a separate app. It certainly speeds up the workflow in instances where you’re working on a document, spreadsheets, and presentations all at once.

More than that, however, this new mobile platform also allows the transformation of images into Word and Excel files with relatively good accuracy—subject, of course, to image quality. There are also built-in actions that cover a wide spectrum of enterprise needs like PDF creation and electronic signing for contracts, Sticky Notes for quick drafting of ideas and facilitated file transfer. Overall it’s a streamlined experience that will make working on the go significantly easier.

More is coming in Microsoft 365

The transition to Microsoft 365 is going to take many more months of implementation and staggered releases. It’s clear, however, that this isn’t just a matter of a mere name change. Microsoft is looking to the future here and is working to ensure that its full range of products are future ready and adapting to evolving trends in both the tech and enterprise world.

The post Microsoft 365: An Overview of what’s to Come appeared first on ICPlan.

Microsoft Yammer: Guiding Principles

Before we delve deeper into what else Microsoft Yammer has to offer, it’s important that we understand the main principles that guide the move towards a newer version—as well as the key areas of focus and emphasis. There are three concepts that guide the recreation of Yammer: communities, knowledge, and engagement. A lot of the changes are guided in the quest to strengthen these three principles.

It’s no surprise, of course, that these three are currently dominant in the enterprise. What Microsoft Yammer aims to empower is the development of communities within companies that drive culture and proactive action among colleagues. Within these communities, the platform aims to promote easy knowledge sharing internally. Ultimately, all of these elements create a deeper sense of employee engagement and a richer employee experience.

On a more practical level, these principles are also reflected in the cross-platform compatibility that Microsoft Yammer now strives for—not just with different Office 365 programs and applications, but also access points . As of this writing, much of the changes can be seen in the web versions of applications—such as with Outlook—but the design team has already said that a roll-out towards mobile and desktop applications is currently in the works.

They have also recently released a standalone Teams integration called Communities, which lets users have a fully interactive Yammer experience natively interact with Yammer directly from the popular collaboration platform.

Social Media With a Twist of Enterprise

Its own designers have billed it as an “enterprise social tool for community sharing” which is essentially social media for businesses. The closest comparison to an already familiar platform would be Workplace from Facebook. With the overhaul of the platform first being announced towards the end of last year, the similarities to Workplace from Facebook are striking. Just as a key component of Workplace from Facebook’s success is its familiarity, Yammer is treading the same path to good effect with a fresh focus on user experience.

For one thing, interacting with posts and announcements throws up options for rich text formatting. This allows users to put emphasis on responses however they see fit with options for bold, italic, and underlines. GIFs are easy to share with an embedded carousel to choose from. Perhaps the strongest feature is a dropdown highlighting your recent work on Word, Excel and even PowerPoint which you can readily share to any relevant thread or post.

All of these are presented in what Microsoft Yammer calls “social cards”. It’s a subtle but integral design choice that ties directly to the aim of cross-platform compatibility.  Each post is an entity unto itself. When shared via Teams and even Outlook, they look and act exactly as they would were they viewed in Yammer. It’s a critical feature that enables users who are more deeply embedded and involved with other Office 365 programs to enjoy full functionality as though they were viewing it directly on Yammer.

Enhanced Features for an Enhanced Experience

The features mentioned above are found within competitor software, but there is also a whole stack of new features unique to this new version of Microsoft Yammer itself. First among these is the Office 365 People Card. These are the equivalent of profiles in other social media and are tied directly to users added into your organisation Active Directory. These are useful for situating a person as they show where they sit in the hierarchy, who they collaborate with, events that you share with that person, and even messages and files shared between the two of you.

Another great innovation resulted from listening to their customer’s requests. The new Yammer now features AI curation when it comes to content in the feed. What it does is to filter and prioritise the content you see based on what is relevant to your job role, your position, and your interests so that they’re top of the screen. This adds a layer of relevance to what you get before you each time you check Yammer. This also applies to what is delivered to your Outlook inbox should you enable such notifications.

Other improvements sourced from users include improvements to the community section. For one, there’s the ability to post a cover photo to a community page. This can be used to better brand and can even be used to keep key announcements front and centre. Conversations too can be pinned within communities for above the fold attention — especially useful with key discussions. Within these conversations, users have the same rich options to customize responses as they do with social cards.

Microsoft Yammer in a Crisis

In times of crisis communications take centre stage in maintaining order amid the fear and uncertainty that can easily spread. Microsoft Yammer has acknowledged the critical role it plays and has incorporated crisis thinking into its reinvigoration of the platform. Empowerment is the name of the game and the platform allows for key information sharing at scale.

The ‘communities’ within Microsoft Yammer form an effective and safe gathering place for the fielding and answering of key questions and answers before, during, and after a crisis — regardless of where your employees and your HR/Comms personnel are located. The relative ease-of-use and simplicity of the platform make it easy to monitor, and the built-in AI makes focusing on common, critical issues so much easier—including mobile accessibility.

When Hurricane Irma ravaged the United States in 2017, Johnson & Johnson utilized Microsoft Yammer among other platforms. In particular, Yammer was used to create a community to facilitate communications with affected employees — even those employees that opened their homes to displaced members of the public. Key documents and files were also easily shared to employees and stakeholders. Yammer was also used by their senior leadership to talk directly to their employees and take charge of the situation.

Johnson & Johnson’s Employee Home Share initiative was a success – in part – because of Microsoft Yammer, and the team was quick to point out the simplicity of utilizing the system as a cornerstone of success. It allowed the creation of a centralized, global, and wholly online safe haven for their people. The company came out of the crisis relatively unscathed and much stronger for it. A culture of caring and mutual support emerged from the crisis revolving around the platform.

Outlook Integration Explored

Based on their own internal research, Microsoft has found that Outlook is still its most widely used service. After all, email remains relevant to employees and employers the world over. At present, in its web version, Microsoft has empowered Outlook users with a Microsoft Yammer integration that can be best described as near-native. Posts and announcements, as we already mentioned, appear exactly as they would if they were viewed in Yammer.

How you interact with the post is completely the same as what you get in the Yammer application also. For example, viewing images on a post throws up a pop-out gallery that you can scroll through. When checking on who liked or interacted with an announcement, a slider pops up from the right listing the information. You can like, respond, and even mark ‘best’ answers for reference. Polls created in Microsoft Yammer and shared to Outlook can be acted upon and monitored in real-time.

On top of that, you can easily shift to the classic, standard email view should you want to share an announcement or poll to anyone else in the ecosystem. One great feature that works in the background is that analytics work regardless of whether engagement was through Microsoft Yammer or Outlook. This makes it easy and accurate to track key data points that guide communications planning. Again, it’s on the web version for now, but they’re looking to roll it out to the mobile and desktop versions of Outlook come April to June of this year.

Microsoft Yammer Leverages the Power of Video

A study by the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) has found that employees are more likely to recall and retain over 95% of any particular message when it comes at them in video format. That same study has found that a whopping 93% of internal communication experts consider video to be a key tool in their arsenal. On the other side of the coin, 59% of those in senior leadership prefer watching video content over reading it in text format.

A Study in Effectiveness

It’s really a clear trend, especially on social media, with many companies and even news outlets pushing out video content for their key releases over any other — both internally and externally. One great example of this is the Alzheimer’s Society. They pushed out a new five-year plan via the launch of their own internal TV channel. This channel featured a film that expertly explained the key policy changes on top of explaining why the changes mattered. It was very successful among their 2,500 employees as well as their 9,000 volunteers.

The Video Advantage Applied

For Microsoft Yammer and its design team, their goals in improving video capabilities within the platform include building trust and authenticity in their leaders, meaningful information dissemination, and full employee engagement towards the company vision. Towards those ends, they focused their work on optimizing their work-flow through every event cycle’s natural touchpoints. All this through a platform that supports everything from professional on-site productions, semi-professional broadcasts from anywhere, and even ad-hoc mobile videos as would be the case with some executive blogs.

Professional videos are those that result in high-quality output as is the case with explainer videos, roundtable discussions, town halls and the like. Semi-professional options include coverage in the field — as would be the case in product launches or new office openings. Finally, ad-hoc can be as simple as the CEO sharing his thoughts and opinions casually and on-the-go. While each has value on its own—they can come together in a natural flow to push a full-fledged campaign.

An Example in Action

Say you wanted to run an outreach program where employees reach out to local kids to help teach them how to read. A professional video can be created to get the whole company aligned with the ideals of the program. You could even go for a live event set up for launch. At the organizational level—with the use of semi-professional setups like webinars or even local live videos—you can then reinforce the message or go deeper with tutorials on the most effective techniques for teaching reading.

Ad hoc videos can then be those on the ground—employee-made videos showing them and their experiences with the kids that they teach. Or even videos where they share their experiences and emotions as they undergo a program. There really is no need to have each tier mutually exclusive. They, in fact, work best in support of one another. That’s just one example. The central idea behind videos on Microsoft Yammer is to create meaningful connections that facilitate shared knowledge.

Towards that end, Yammer can be used to host webinars that are crafted and launched in Microsoft Teams. It’s currently set for internal users only, which makes it a powerful tool for internal comms efforts. A great thing about webinars set up through Teams and funnelled through Microsoft Yammer is that it enables for deeper engagement via company-wide chat and comments. All of the video content is stored in Microsoft Stream for easy access. Note the mobile videos are still stored in SharePoint for the moment — something that their team is looking to fix in the future.

Microsoft Yammer Compliance and Security

A final point worth looking at with the rollout of the new Microsoft Yammer are its compliance and security measures. A lot of these new integrations are to run parallel to Office 365’s existing Security and Compliance Centres. These improvements centre around Native Mode. This includes the assignment to one Tenant to one Yammer set up. It also implies that users are mapped in Azure’s Active Directory, that all groups created are connected to a single Office 365 Group, and that — eventually — all Yammer files will be stored in SharePoint.

Another important aspect worth touching on is smarter eDiscovery. Integration with Microsoft Yammer means that you can not only search by user and view their full Office 365 profile, but all their messages through Yammer are now visible alongside any others that they have sent via other platforms. These messages can be filtered based on key parameters like author, recipient, and even community. This makes it far easier to search for content as needed.

Lastly, minimum and maximum data retention parameters will also feature in the newest iteration of Microsoft Yammer. Users will have two options when getting rid of content. Archive mode will put things away into long-term storage. Delete mode will completely erase content after 30 days’ time. Also, it is important to note that deleting any groups will then result in the deletion of messages therein. All this allows finer control over the lifecycle of your content.

A New Microsoft Yammer for the Future

All of these changes represent not just the future of Microsoft Yammer, but also Microsoft’s commitment to integrating features that its user base has long clamoured for. It’s a promising move for a platform that seeks to fulfil a popular comms niche in today’s world from within Office 365’s already impressive Enterprise Suite.

The post Microsoft Yammer: Revitalized, Reinvigorated appeared first on ICPlan.

Microsoft Stream and the Rise of Video

As of 2020, over 2 billion people log into YouTube on a monthly basis—that’s a lot of people consuming content ranging from the professional productions to amateur projects covering a range of topics. Even that number pales in comparison to the 4 billions video views that Facebook sees on a daily basis. The reason why video is so popular a medium is because moving images catch the eye, and actively engage other senses, like sound through compelling audio, adding to its power.

For internal communications, these advantages are magnified when you realize that the often busy nature of work and deluge of other mediums makes video truly standout. In fact, a study by Ragan has found that 75% of all employees are more likely to watch a video over any other medium. Somewhat ironically, while many companies are quick to have a YouTube presence for external comms, they tend to lock it down internally for fear of lost productivity. That’s where Microsoft Stream comes in.

What is Microsoft Stream?

Microsoft bills Stream as a secure video service. Through it, enterprise users can safely upload their own video content which can then be shared within their company. What sets Microsoft Stream apart is the ability to manage restrictions on access via identity management system Azure Active Directory. This allows you to utilize your platform for even the most secure and private of content reserved for those higher up in your organization’s hierarchy.

It’s a highly adaptive platform—allowing you to use it for general internal communications as well as live online training sessions for up to 10,000 attendees. Best of all, it’s integrated into a host of other Microsoft 365 enterprise products to make it easy to share content or invite colleagues to participate across a bevvy of different channel options. Again, all of this within a system that is safe and secure. If you’re familiar with how YouTube works, you already have the basics down to pat, but there’s so much more to discover.

Creating Channels and Workgroups

An essential feature to Microsoft Stream is the ability to create channels—a basic to all video streaming sites nowadays. Within Stream, you have two options when it comes to channels. The first is companywide which is perfect if you want to organize things by topic. These channels are those that can be seen by the whole company. In fact, only videos with the widest spanning accessibility features can be added to them. Further control lies in the fact that only channel creators and the overall Stream admin can edit the channel.

Group channels are where Microsoft Stream diverts from other video streaming and sharing platforms. These can be customized with tighter permissions and limited to a set cluster of employees as needed. For example, you could have a channel focus entirely on your Sales team and limited to employees within that team. Their content can be more highly focused and attuned to their needs. For either channel, there are customization options that allow for internal branding.

Interestingly enough, it’s with organization focused features like these that you get your first taste of the Microsoft 365 integration. When you create Microsoft 365 Groups, they automatically create workspaces within streams for any videos that are created. Best of all, the membership settings of the Microsoft 365 Group automatically applies to the workspace created. This organization within Microsoft Stream makes it all that easier to share content seamlessly.

Microsoft Stream Cross-Platform Integration

Speaking of sharing, the true breadth of the sharing capabilities of Microsoft Stream can best be experienced in other applications in the Microsoft 365 Suite. SharePoint, with its ability to create team microsites for customized news and updates, is one of the best examples of strong Streams integration. Embedding a video already uploaded on Microsoft Stream is a simple matter of looking for the ‘web part’ in the list of components you can add to your SharePoint site.

Another very practical integration is within Teams. If you utilize that platform for keeping constant lines of communication open with your employees, you can easily push video content from Microsoft Stream into Teams. The simplest is to cut and paste the video’s particular URL into any conversation. If you wanted to put in a whole channel, just add it as a tab—Microsoft Stream appears among the options that you can select. From there, you just put in the URL for the channel or specific video you wish to share.

Still in Teams, it bears mentioning that you can also use Microsoft Stream to aggregate, collect, and organize recordings that you make of your video conferences in the platform. This is perfect for gathering minutes of your meetings which you can share later on with whoever needs it. As soon as these recordings are uploaded to Stream, they behave like any video uploaded on the platform. This means you can share it again as needed.

Interactive Videos with Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Stream really shines with the way content can be interacted with. For example, speech from an uploaded video can be transcribed side-by-side with the content as it is playing. This transcription can then be searched for key ideas and words for easy reference. Facial detection software identifies people within the video. Their particular portions within the video can then be jumped to via a visual timeline beneath your video itself.

These features make Microsoft Stream perfect for running training or informational campaigns. Whether in-person, over Teams, or through self-discovery, these features allow your employees to research specific concepts that they might want to focus on or revisit easily. No longer will they have to haphazardly click on a video timeline. They can also easily jump to key speakers as they might be directed to or go back to key points for reference with ease.

A great application would be ‘welcome videos’ for new employees. With Microsoft Stream, not only will they be able to take this welcome video with them wherever they go, but they can also easily search for key explanations on policies that they might find unclear or want to go back to. Your welcome video’s section on benefits or diversity and inclusion could be searched by term. Or they can even jump to sections featuring your HR manager if they wanted to review everything in one go.

Live events are also a possibility with Microsoft Stream. You can start them up from within the platform or have those started in Yammer and Teams saved onto Stream. All those intelligent interactive features don’t apply to the event itself, but they are applied afterwards once the final video is uploaded post-event. A final thing worth mentioning is that the technology is accurate but not completely perfect. Much depends on the quality of the video and audio uploaded to get things right.

Microsoft Stream Supports Forms

A final useful interactive feature in Microsoft Stream is the ability to embed all manner of forms alongside your video as it runs. Based on the useful Microsoft Forms platform, these can be anything from feedback forms all the way to interactive quizzes about the video. You can even run surveys to quickly gauge opinion on your video content—the results of which will arrive far more quickly than having it be a separate activity.

Setting it up is very intuitive. When you click on the ‘Add Form’ button as you prepare the video for upload, you get boxes for the Microsoft Forms URL as well as for the name of your form. You can then select the specific point on the timeline to embed the form into. When your employee reaches that point in your video, the form will unobtrusively pop up beside—and not over—the video for your employees to answer.

Inject Vibrance Into Your Communications Through Video

With Microsoft Stream, you have a secure, smart, and simple platform with which to upload and stream videos to your employees. It features a great many customization and organization options to ensure that everything is easily accessible by those who need specific content. The addition of intelligent interactivity features expands the platform’s utility into that of an effective training, educational, and reference tool for your employees.

The post Microsoft Stream: Bringing the Power of Video to Enterprise appeared first on ICPlan.

Microsoft Yammer and Fluent Design

The new Microsoft Yammer and its design are all informed by what Microsoft calls its Fluent Design System. Philosophically, ‘Fluent’ refers to the idea that technology and its use should have a natural, intuitive flow from one platform or device to the next. It’s really a reflection on how we consume technology nowadays—we often start work on our laptops and personal computers then shift to our tablets and mobile devices as we move about.

It’s a fitting design paradigm choice for Microsoft which used to be plagued by terrible cross-platform integration. Now, in more practical terms, ‘Fluent’ design is about anticipating use cases of its products and ensuring the overall user experience is crafted to meet many needs, contexts, and uses with little fuss and confusion. It’s certainly a long way from the days when Apple took potshots at the company for being the opposite of Fluent in its user experience.

What Fluent Means for Microsoft Yammer

A look at many other Office 365 programs will give you a glimpse into the future for what this could mean for Microsoft Yammer. There’s been a clear shift toward single colours—apart from white, that is—and an overall cleaner look. It’s certainly the first impression that you have when you visit the new Yammer. Fluent design influences are apparent in the much more organized look. Everything that you could possibly need is on display.

For one, there’s the much clearer company branding that includes your company logo and business name. There’s a prominent search bar as well as all the basic application controls and settings on the top. All these make it much easier to get to anything that you would like to change and customise in terms of your overall experience using the program. You even have easy access to your Office 365 profile card—changes to which will apply across the entire network.

Fluent Design Prioritises Engagement

When you move to the social cards themselves, you’ll find that Fluent design has ensured that engagement is a clear priority. Images and media content are prominent and eye-catching, but the real gem is in the comment section. Much like many other social media, there are the requisite reaction, comment, and share options. Conversations are tiered to keep threads in order. It’s clear, however, that Yammer intends to take advantage of a strong Office 365 integration.

There’s a dedicated button that allows you to share documents and files from everywhere in your company’s Office 365 network—from SharePoint to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more. From an employee standpoint, this makes collaboration significantly easier. From a comms standpoint, it will allow you to share content relevant to an employee post for clarity and support—without having to needlessly trawl through your own files.

AI and Guided Discovery in Fluent Design

AI is a big deal nowadays and features in everything from bots to even assisted search, and its presence can be strongly felt in the new Fluent design version of Yammer. For one thing, your discovery feed itself is curated to show you what matters to you. Depending on your job role, your prior search queries, and other little bits of detail that is sourced from your interaction with Office 365’s other applications, the AI learns what’s important and pushes it front and centre.

This is also applied to your search experience in general where you can easily find what matters to you at the moment. Perhaps the best applications of this machine learning have to do with the aforementioned ability to attach files. AI guides this behaviour and suggests the files that are most relevant to a particular post or conversation. It’s an easy way to have all activities flow more naturally for users in your company.

Fluent Design Guides Building Communities

One great update with Yammer is the focus on stronger community support. The communities within Yammer allowed one to create spaces to build camaraderie, cooperation, and collaboration. All three are reinforced by the ability to better brand internally within communities. Cover photos can be handily replaced with team or departmental logos or even guidelines and infographics that communities want to bring to the fore.

The expansiveness of Fluent Design can be seen in the ease by which communities can be managed via smartphone. The interface has been simplified for ease-of-use. Simpler, some have argued, than Workplace from Facebook’s interface which has become cluttered of late as more features are added into the mix. Posting is an easy and fluid experience as is, again, attaching relevant files from anywhere in your Office 365 network into a post.

One area of mobile where Fluent Design really shines is in video capture. Tools are in place to make the process of capturing, editing, and publishing a breeze. This is perfect for highly mobile comms or remote setups where high production value videos might not be easy to undertake. There are many great internal comms opportunities to be had with this improvement: from direct CEO comms to their employees to even on-site community updates.

A Smoother Fluent Design Native Experience

Those who are most invested in Office 365’s full suite of enterprise products are the ones most likely to enjoy the benefits of Fluent Design. Outlook is one particular platform where Yammer shines in its new iteration. The Native mode integration makes each inbox a mini-Yammer. You interact with posts shared to you in much the same way that you would were you to view them in Yammer. While limited to the web version of Outlook for now, it has been verified that the desktop and mobile versions are soon to follow.

It’s pretty much the same story when it comes to the conversations web part of SharePoint. Again, you can add file attachments from your work network, set up robust question and answer sessions, and share rich text content. All of this with the same level of coherence with the original Yammer platform. It breathes new life into a platform many often consider ‘yet another’ that they have to contend with—presenting a truly vibrant platform for communications.

The Power of Integration

If Microsoft and its adoption of Fluent Design across its platform prove anything, it’s that investing in a fully integrated suite of enterprise solutions is a worthwhile one. With Microsoft Yammer, you leverage the power of social media to enhance your communications across your company and its communities. There are a lot of exciting design changes being pushed out and more down the line to be explored. It shows that Microsoft is starting to listen to what its customers want the most.

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